I know I’m rather late with this, but I did promise everyone who helped me to buy a Macbook Air that I’d get Chromium OS running on it: so I did and it’s pretty awesome.

Every piece of hardware works except for the Bluetooth (because Bluetooth isn’t supported by Chromium OS yet). So WiFi works, graphics are fully accelerated via nVidia’s drivers, screen brightness controls work, sound works, touchpad works. Basically everything works. The touchpad drivers could use some tweaking, as scrolling is currently painfully slow, but that’s about the only issue I can think of. Boot time is around 22 seconds to the login screen, most of which is wasted by Apple’s EFI implementation, as once control is passed to the kernel, the boot only takes a further 6-7 seconds thanks to the fast SSD inside the Air. Battery life is probably slightly better than that of OS X.

I’ve only tested this on an 11″ model of the Air (MacbookAir3,1), since that’s all I have, but I should think it’d work without issue on the 13″ version (MacbookAir3,2) too. I’ve also not tested previous generations of the Macbook Air, but I suspect they’ll work too. Infact, this image will probably work on quite a number of nVidia-based Macbook/Macbook Pro machines. I won’t be supporting anything but the MacbookAir3,1 and MacbookAir3,2 but if it just happens to work for you on something else, great!

Turns out a recent update to ChromeOS has added GSM support for the Gobi 3G chip that’s in the Cr-48, and it’s working just great.

Since some people seem to want to run their Cr-48 on AT&T and so on, I figured I should share. Turns out, it’s really easy to enable. You need to be in developer mode, but that’s pretty much the only requirement. As usual, you do this totally at your own risk and I’m not responsible for anything that might go wrong. Basically, the standard disclaimer crap. With that said, here’s the howto:

1. Pop your SIM card into the slot under the battery (must be a full-size SIM, microSIMs you’ll just lose in there, fine if you use an adaptor though)
2. Make sure you’ve enabled developer mode – do this by flipping the switch under your battery
3. Once you’re booted into developer mode and logged in, press Control-Alt-T
4. This opens crosh, a limited command shell. Since we’re in developer mode, we can get a full shell. Type the word shell and press enter.
5. You’ll get a shell that starts with ‘chronos@localhost / $’. Once you’ve got this, we can type in the command that flips over to GSM.
6. Type the following command: modem_set_carrier “Generic UMTS”
7. Wait a couple of minutes, then you can exit the shell by typing exit twice.
8. Your 3G should be usable assuming you have an active service plan on that SIM card, and that ChromeOS knows your APN settings.

This is all totally unfinished right now, I just saw that the changes had shipped in a recent update and decided to see if they worked, turns out they do. However, there are a few drawbacks:

• Your APN details have to be part of a hardcoded list list in flimflam, you can see this list here.
• Your carrier name won’t appear in the UI, nor will any usage details. Don’t complain if you run up a huge bill, same deal here as tethering when it comes to data usage.
• It’s totally experimental, so it might break totally unexpectedly.

After a 2 month hiatus, the Vanilla builders are finally back online. I’ve done some work to bring an incremental build down to just 20 minutes. As a result of this, I may increase the frequency of builds from daily to twice daily. These are still the same Vanilla builds as before, which means we’re still shipping support for the Chrome Web Store, the fancy new login UI and so on. However, as a result of our server move, Vanilla AU is down for the time being. Rather than try to set up the hacky system I had before again, I’m going to re-implement the AU server from scratch. This will be open source, and we’ll have more details on this in the coming weeks. Which brings me to today’s second big announcement; Lime.

ChromiumOS Lime is the successor to ChromiumOS Flow, and brings together the bleeding edge freshness of a Vanilla build and the expanded hardware support you’re used to in a Flow build. I know lots of you have been asking for an update to Flow, and I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long. So here’s the good news. I’m aiming to release Lime within the next two weeks. It will ship with Lime AU as part of the image, but the servers will not be live at launch. The goal is to release within two weeks, but I’m not making any guarantee that it will be available within two weeks. However, we’ll be starting limited betas so that I can test on hardware I don’t own in the next week or so. If you’d like to be a part of this, then make sure you’re in the IRC channel (##hexxeh on irc.freenode.org). You can also watch the status of the builders in there, and get notified when a new Vanilla build is completed.

Lastly, I’d like to send a huge thank you to Google: I spent the last week over in California at their Mountain View campus, and got the chance to watch the Chrome event on Tuesday with the Chrome/ChromeOS team! I had an awesome time, and it was fantastic meeting the teams! Thanks for being so supportive of my project in general.

Firstly, some updates. The Chromepad demo is, quite real, I can assure you all. However, given that it’s so complicated to setup, I don’t really have any plans to release it in the near future. Maybe in a few months time. I’d rather not get the backlash of users asking for help with it in it’s current state.