the onda

To close off on the Google Chrome OS thoughts, I decided to go back to my favorite whipping boy, the netbook. Over the last two years I've had a couple of HP models which have showcased good hardware build quality and features (especially for sub $400 devices) but piss poor software (at the office we've even joked that all netbooks are good for are constantly installing OSes on them to try to make them useful).

This time though I wanted to try the latest Netbook Remix based on the 9.10 Ubuntu release and I have to say that it is an amazing feat of engineering on the part of the Canonical folks. Gone are the days of compiling custom kernels for two weeks and incessant fiddling with /etc/X11/XF86Config to get the display to look right. In fact, having recently installed Windows 7 on the same machine, I can attest that outside of a couple of wireless network issues, the installation experience is just as good.

But that is not the real news here. The important stuff happens when you've got a working base configuration and then load the Chromium browser on it (Chromium is the name of the open source project based on the Chrome browser Google is building). Whereas Firefox 3.5 remains a complete pig on the Atom processor, Chromium screams, running at almost the same clip on the Google family of Javascript intensive apps as Safari 4 on my 5x as expensive Core2 Duo Macbook Pro.

And to boot, the minimalistic UI of the Chrome browser, along with its sane fullscreen performance, are the best things to have happened to the DVD player-like squished screens on these netbooks since they first started showing up 2 years ago.

I remain skeptical about Chrome OS (after all with UNR you get text editors, a local filesystem, and a whole host of useful client apps to drive the various peripherals you may want to use), but for the first time since the inception of the netbook, I've can claim that if you want an affordable and super portable laptop that you can beat up while traveling, Chrome the browser and UNR 9.10 may have finally gotten us here.

Note: The machine that runs this so well is a first generation HP Mini MIE 1000, possible the nicest hardware to ship with the shittiest software (an HP badged Ubuntu custom distro) since the Apple Lisa. It has a 1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB solid state drive, and I believe it cost about $350 when new.