We’ll get to the play-by-play on how to test out Chromium, but first, a discussion on why school technologists and teachers might be interested in trying this out. There is also a PDF application that is only available on Chrome OS. However, Chrome OS comes with automatic-updates and more reliability since it is built specifically for certain machines. Chrome Browser – a web browser, like Firefox or Explorer, which looks almost identical to what you see when you load up either of the operating systems.Ĭhrome OS and Chromium OS share the exact same code-base – in fact they are much more alike then different. It’s open-source and supported by the development community.ģ. Chromium OS – this is what we can download and use for free on any machine we like. Google Chrome OS – this is what comes pre-loaded on the new chromebooks and offered to schools in the subscription packages.Ģ. This can get even more confusing because there is also the Chrome browser available for Windows and Mac machines! That’s a lot of different but similar Chromes.ġ.

You see, there are two versions of the Google Operating System (OS) out there. Chrome Browserįirst, the title of this post is admittedly a bit deceitful.

The only tricky parts come when editing and uploading images, as the file system is not at all what you will be used to (but it’s also fun to figure out). 🙂įor the record, since Edublogs is completely web-based, the blogging experience is pretty much the same. So I set out to get my own copy, and have written this entire blog post from the new operating system on an older laptop I had lying around. Plus, I wanted an excuse to give Chrome OS a spin. Since we expect at least some of our users to begin using Chrome OS in the near future, I thought I should test it out. You can download the open-source version, called Chromium OS, for free and boot it up on your computer! It really pushes the whole cloud computing concept to limits we haven’t before experienced.īut what if you want to try out the operating system before shelling out the $380+ for a new device or committing to the education subscription model of $20 per device per month? These netbooks are the first devices marketed towards the average user, schools, and students that don’t run the more familiar Windows or Mac operating systems. As you may have heard, the brand new Chromebooks running Chrome OS are being rolled out by Google this week.

Chrome os operating system