Google announces Chrome OS

Google made an announcement we've been expecting for quiet some time now. They will be releasing their own operating system. It is called Chrome OS according to the official Google blog post, but I wouldn't be surprised if they release it under a more attractive market name.

The architecture is pretty simple: Google Chrome web browser running in a lightweight window manager on a Linux kernel. Both x86 and ARM architectures should be supported and the whole thing will be released as open source.

This step is consistent with Google's long term strategy of making the web the new platform and thus making current operating systems irrelevant. The Chrome version for major desktop systems such as Windows or Linux makes a smooth transition from classic operating systems to web based systems possible.

According to Google the Chrome OS is aimed primarily at netbooks but I'm sure this is just yet another step in their long term plans and many other strategic products for the desktop-to-web transition will follow.

VirtualBox 3.0 stable is here!

Last week I wrote about the new beta version of VirtualBox 3.0 with support for SMP. It wasn't really stable. And neither was the second beta.

This week the VirtualBox 3.0 was finally released. It seems to be stable, I haven't seen any bugs or crashes so far.



Unfortunately if your are using Windows XP as guest system you have to reinstall it. Existing installations of Windows XP that you have created using VirtualBox 1.x or 2.x will show only one CPU no matter how you configure your virtual machine. I guess this is rather a problem with Windows than VirtualBox. Windows always have problems if you move your installed system to a different hardware (virtual or real). The linux kernel or any other sane operating system should detect the change from one to two CPUs without any problems.