Chromium Ion Flow with Better Battery Life!

While Google’s Chrome OS is going to hit the streets until the end of the ties year a Chrome Fanboy, Hexxeh, has taken the the open source Chromium OS. Hexxeh, has been providing popular builds of Chromium OS and his latest release, Flow, adds a whole heap of improvements.

Flow’s Nvidia graphics support gives users a Linux-based operating system on their ION netbooks which will provide accelerated playback of HD videos (including YouTube). Among the new features also added the ability to completely change the menus of the surface as desired, and create new entries. In addition, an automatic update system has been integrated, which keeps the bundled applications always up to date. Also new is support for Realtek RTL8187SE wireless chip that is found in many laptops. There are also some bug fixes, remove the audio and Flash playback, as well as problems with the battery status indicator and the handling of bookmarks.

Thanks Hexxeh via NetbookNews.de Via Netbooked

Samsung doing a 10-inch Chrome OS netbook later this year

Chrome is coming to netbooks and Samsung’s Phil Newton apparently just confirmed that the company will be debuting a Chrome OS netbook later this year, according to a report by Australia’s Channel News. The laptop will be similar to the N210 which is in the photo above (thanks Engadget for the cool photo by the way). Its has a 10.1-inch screen, 3G, WiFi, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of flash storage and a purported 12 hour battery life.

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Jolly good for Jolicloud

A recent tweet from OS maker, Jolicloud, declared on Friday that it was “finalizing Via C7M (1st gen netbooks) and [Intel] Atom Pinetrail (Latest netbooks) support,” and was therefore “moving from 98 to 99.9% compatibility!”
It’s true that by moving to support the VIA C7-M processor – which only about five people throughout the world probably have bunged into their netbooks – the firm does seem to be living up to its promise of wanting to support every little lappie on the planet.

Indeed, just a glance through the already beefy list of compatible devices, one would be hard-pressed to find machines that were not yet supported, and if you do, then Jolicloud wants to hear from you so it can fix the problem.

Jolicloud, a Linux-based operating system – which allows users to run certain web apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook as if they were actual desktop applications – is an OS doing its best to blur the lines between cloud and desk top, and looks very promising indeed.

The OS does allow users to run certain Windows applications too, if the evil mood should strike them, but doing so requires using applications like WINE.

“At Jolicloud, we believe people should be able to switch operating system on their netbooks. Like the adoption of Firefox made the web 2.0 possible, enabling users to switch OS will accelerate the growth and benefits of open cloud computing,” says the firm’s website.
Jolicloud also says it works “hard with OEMs and netbook enthusiasts around the world to provide the best compatibility and the most updated drivers,” and indeed, it would appear that support for Intel’s Atom Pine Trail chips is just around the corner too.
What could be interesting with the new VIA C7-M support, however, is that since VIA is a firm which tends to focus on developing markets in poorer parts of the world, and that since Jolicloud and its apps are free, many may choose it over illegal versions of Windows.
“Yeah, sh*t, if I had a netbook I’d use it!” a prospective punter told Netbook News, adding, “If I wasn’t shackled by this overly-expensive Mac Book Pro, that is.”

How Painting works in Chrome with Brett Wilson

Because of Chromium’s multi-process architecture, painting within Chromium is far from typical. In this talk, Brett Wilson starts from Skia and the WebKit render tree, follows the bits across the process boundaries, and continues all the way to your screen. He also details many of the differences in painting between platforms, how things work in test shell, and interesting corner cases like resizing.

Via Chromium Blog

Learn about Chromium Layout Tests with Pam Greene

Layout Tests are the tests we inherit from the WebKit project and are a very important part of the Chromium’s testing infrastructure. Pam Greene talks about what they are, how to run them, how to debug problems within them, and even touches on how to write your own. She also covers advanced (but easy to use) tools for rebaselining and tracking flakyness. Any Chromium developer that works on WebKit really should check this out!

Via Chromium

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