High-Level Developer FAQ

This FAQ is for developers; check out the General ChromiumOS FAQ for non-development related questions.

Should I call my build ChromiumOS or Google ChromeOS?

You should call it ChromiumOS.

Will the autoupdate feature work on both Google ChromeOS and ChromiumOS?

We don't plan to support autoupdate on ChromiumOS, as we did not build the binaries, and we don't know what modifications you've made to the system, so we don't want to blow away any changes you may have made to the code. Therefore Google will not autoupdate ChromiumOS systems, but you're welcome to set up your own autoupdate server.

Google ChromeOS will autoupdate to keep consumer machines running the latest and greatest at all times.

Will the verified boot feature work on both Google ChromeOS and ChromiumOS?

The verified boot procedure relies on custom firmware and hardware modifications and hence will work only for Google ChromeOS.

What are the minimum hardware requirements?

The open-source nature of ChromiumOS allows it to be ported to an expanding range of hardware; however, some base requirements are likely to remain fixed.

Hardware-accelerated OpenGL or OpenGL ES support is mandatory, and the Chromium browser's memory footprint is an obvious lower bound for RAM.

See the Developer Hardware list for examples of netbooks on which developers are successfully running ChromiumOS.

What about other hardware: Does ChromiumOS support my wifi card?

In order to ensure the best user experience with Google ChromeOS, we're going through a careful hardware selection and testing process for hardware components.

For ChromiumOS, the open source community and Google are working to add support for a very broad range of hardware. If the device you're interested in has an open source driver already in the upstream Linux kernel, please send a request to chromium-os-dev -- if you can include a proposed patch, even better.

Please see our supported developer hardware wiki for more details.

Is it true that you don't support hard disk drives (HDDs)?

Firstly, we should point out that the information in the open source release has been misinterpreted as saying that we don't support local storage. Most Google ChromeOS devices use SSDs although we have a few that also use HDDs. The reasons to prefer SSD is performance and reliability.

ChromiumOS will indeed work with conventional HDDs, though the disk accesses are optimized for flash-based storage, like reduced read-ahead.

ChromiumOS issues

I can't log in

Login may fail under various circumstances. For example, if you do not have network connectivity and you have never logged in before, then you will not be able to log in.

The login screen should display a message beneath the username/password input field. For example, if you have network connectivity and provide the wrong credentials, you will be told that either your username or password is incorrect.

To troubleshoot networking at this point, you have to jump to a virtual terminal (only enabled on dev machines) by using Ctrl+Alt+F2 (you might need to use the shared user password that to login if you set it).

If you are able to log in to the virtual terminal, reconfigure the networking service (sudo restart shill). Note: If you are having trouble with wireless, just plug in an Ethernet cable. It is much easier to troubleshoot a networking issue once you have logged in.

How is timezone managed?

On ChromiumOS, local timezone is managed by the Chromium browser. The default timezone is Pacific Time (PST). To change it, please refer to https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/177871?hl=en.

In the case of a Chrome-less build, the timezone is left unset and defaulted to UTC. To set to a different timezone, the symlink /var/lib/timezone/localtime should be linked to a specific zone file, such as /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC.

Miscellaneous

What are the shortcut keys?

To get a visual overlay, hit Ctrl-Alt-/ and then hold modifier keys like Ctrl, Alt, and Shift to see the associated hotkeys.

Most browser shortcuts also apply: https://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95743

Are native applications supported?

Google ChromeOS is a web-centric system, so all applications are web applications; this provides powerful and simple manageability and security. To write applications that will benefit from native code execution we recommend using NativeClient, an open source project that allows web apps to run native code securely within a browser. See http://code.google.com/chrome/nativeclient/ for more details.

Of course ChromiumOS is open source, and it's Linux. This means that as a developer you can do pretty much anything you want, including installing any Linux application.