PRE-RELEASE BUILD OF CHROME OS SUPPORTS NVIDIA ION
Google will not officially release its Chrome OS until later this year, but since the OS is open source anybody can work on the code and develop a pre-release version which can be installed and run on your PC. Developer Hexxeh has now released a version of the Chromium OS (Chromium is the open source version of Chrome) and it supports NVIDIA ION chipset.
The NVIDIA ION platform combines a high power NVIDIA graphics with a low power Atom power. ION powered netbooks can handle HD video playback. Very few are available at the moment and they include the Eee PC 1201N, Lenovo IdeaPad S12, Samsung N510, and HP Mini 311. All of these machines can run Windows and play HD video. But in case you aren’t keen on running Windows, you can now install the Hexxeh version of Chromium and still enjoy HD video playback.
The Google Chrome is a light-weight, Linux-based operating system. It is meant for use in netbooks and is built around a web browser. Chrome can’t rival Windows in functionality. But if you only use your netbook for surfing the web, you probably don’t need an OS like Windows which is very demanding on your resources.