Google Chrome OS is a basic operating system built upon the Linux kernel. It uses a custom graphical user interface which is based around Google’s very fast web browser, Google Chrome. It does away with most of the regular operating system and application usage paradigms and focuses primarily on the web browser and therefore Google’s primary domains in the computer software marketplace, search and web applications.

This new operating system is initially designed to run on net book style hardware. Google have been in talks with a large variety of hardware companies and aim to have Google Chrome OS powered computers released to consumers before the end of 2010.

As emphasised in the video, Google Chrome OS is designed to almost exclusively utilise web applications and thus almost all data, excluding locally stored caches, is held on the Internet, thus promoting the use of cloud computing for data storage. With Google Mail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, Google already has a formidable cloud based productivity suite in the form of  web applications.

It will be very interesting to see how well the open-source Google Chrome OS does and how it helps in the general promotion of alternative open-source operating systems as a whole.

What do you think? Is Google Chrome OS good for Linux?

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Originally released in September of 2008, Dropbox has grown to be an enormously useful and popular online storage solution. Although Dropbox functions as a storage solution, its most welcoming features are the live synchronisation and sharing features the software and service provides.

For those who have been missing out, Dropbox is incredibly simple to use. Essentially, you simply download a small application which runs in the background on your computer. This program creates a ‘Dropbox’ or ‘My Dropbox’ folder on your computer, and any files and/or folders placed within said folder are automatically synchronised to the online Dropbox storage service.

Most importantly, the Dropbox application can be installed on multiple computers allowing your files to be synchronised rapidly and automatically between many different computers. This can be immensely useful to users of multiple different computer systems, such as a home desktop PC, a work PC, a laptop and so on. Dropbox therefore replaces the need to carry around USB sticks and/or e-mailing files to yourself.

With a free account, you get 2 gigabytes of online storage space. Dropbox also includes a full revision control system and backup of deleted files, allowing files that are deleted accidentally to be restored via the web interface from any computer. The revision control system developed by Dropbox also allows you to restore files to earlier versions again using the simple Dropbox web interface.

I have personally been using Dropbox for many months now and can highly recommend it, both as a synchronisation service and a reliable backup system that has saved my important files on at least one occasion in recent memory. If you wish, you can download the Dropbox application here for Windows, Linux or Mac.

Copyright: The image in this article may be copyright to Dropbox, and is used under terms of fair use in good faith.

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