[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 10:10:37AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
>> I don't know that I ever thought of the earlier Red Hat releases as
>> seriously attempting to be desktop-ready.  As I recall, the first
>> real effort to make a desktop friendly Linux was Caldera Desktop
>> Linux, which was based off Red Hat (2.something, IIRC), but at the
>> time, RH was still shipping stuff like FVWM as it's default window
>> manager, maybe it was that horrible mangling that wound up getting
>> bundled as 'fvwm95', which had a Windows-style 'Start' button.  Back
>> then, I was still jumping back and forth between FVWM 1.x and tvtwm.
>
> What window manager was there in 1995? KDE and GNOME did not exist,
> CDE was a commercial product. According to the Wikipedia, FVWM
> existed before then, but I don't remember it being in Slackware.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fvwm

When I first started playing with Linux, in 1993, I think we were
running TWM, as that was the default WM shipped wth XF86.  By the time
I'd discovered Slackware, I was using fvwm 1.4.something, this would
have been early 1994, If my memory serves.  I think it offered TWM,
FVWM, and OLWM, which was some free windowmanager designed to look &
feel like the one Sun was shipping with, before they jumped on the CDE
bandwagon.

> FVWM-95 was FVWM hacked to look like Windows 95, but althought the
> wikipedia says it was produced in 1995, I don't remember seeing it
> until several years later.

My earliest memory of FVWM-95 was probably in 1997.  I remember we
switched one of our developer's desktops to it when he left his screen
unlocked one day.  He was amused enough by it that he left it that way
for quite a while.

> It wasn't that Red Hat was not intended to be a desktop friendly
> Linux, as it were, it's just that Linux was not very desktop friendly
> at that point.

It was at least as desktop friendly as any other major Unix offering of
the time. :)

>> True enough.  Just like I would imagine very few people refer to
>> their G1 phones as running Linux, they refer to it as running
>> Android.  The kernel, by that point, is rather irrelevant.
>
> I don't know how long that will be. Unless Google brands their OS as
> Android, the Android phones will probably be re-branded as ChromeOS,
> or whatever they actually call it.

>From what I gather, ChromeOS will be a different animal from Android.
Android will continue to be for small/embeded devices like phones,
webpads, and set-top boxes.  ChromeOS is aimed at being the new
thin-client for the Google cloud.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org