BenV's notes » virtualbox

Google Chrome OS in Virtualbox

BenV — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:45:54 +0000

So with all the hype around google’s upcoming Chrome OS, I was getting curious what it was all about.
Linux based web stuff, open source… yeah, that’s all cute, but just words. So today the option arrived to see what we’re dealing with. These clowns have a download page where you can download a virtual machine image to check out a snapshot of Chrome OS.

I went to their page and found out they require a login for no apparent reason. I tried bugmenot and decided that bugmenot is a piece of shit since they refuse to carry logins for almost all sites I try to use it for. Getting angry with the login I registered with a throwaway email account (if you don’t have one, consider using something like mailinator) and downloaded their image. Wonder why they don’t use a torrent for it… oh well, their problem.
And since I’m still fed up with their login garbage, HERE’S A DIRECT LINK TO THE CHROME OS IMAGE. It will probably break real soon, but wget on this link worked on a completely different machine, so you might get lucky for now.

Once the image completed downloading and after installing the latest version (3.0.12 today) of VirtualBox, I created a new machine. Obviously I couldn’t be bothered to read whatever the clowns of gdtd had to say (if anything) about creating a virtual machine and the required settings for that, so I went with “It’s Linux, enable all possible acceleration and NX flags and whatnot and put it on a SATA controller, for network use a bridge, and here’s 1024MB of memory”. Surprisingly it worked right away.
After only a few seconds this screen came up:

Chrome OS Login screen

Guess that screen could still use some design improvements. Oh well, early version and all, don’t care.
But what do we use to login?
Our google account of course! That was to be expected. After logging in a browser pops up:

Chrome OS after login

Well, that’s great. A browser. But what else does it have?

Clicking on the leftmost tab thingy gives us some more toys for now:

Took a while to load over here though, but that could be because of a slow internet connection.
All these ‘applications’ are actually shortcuts to websites. Google Docs etc are nothing new, and the Chess application is simply a piece of flash. Oh well, at least that means flash works.

Conclusion:
It’s a fun toy for now, quick to boot but not so great if you have a slow internet connection. Other than that it’s not really useful yet, but that’s to be expected from an early build like this.
Maybe I’ll try it on some real iron later. Since Google is targetting it at netbooks etc I might give it a shot on our EEE PC
It will be interesting to see how this OS turns out when they finally release it.

Aion

BenV — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:19:35 +0000

Lately I’ve heard some rumors about this new mmorhghhghg coming up called “Aion“.
Fileplanet (you know, the cancer popup site you sometimes get when you need to download a game patch and then need to click through 23894723897 registration things etc… which is barred from bugmenot…. *sigh*) handed out open beta keys. So I got one. And so did lotjuh.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6

Not only the installation, but also the updater ran fine:

Aion Updater

Then the gameguard part came, it looked promising:

Aion GameGuard part`

However, to all good things must come an end. So it dies because of hardware acceleration issues. No real surprise, but too bad for Virtualbox. Not there yet.

Aion dies

Maybe it’ll work one day when Virtualbox gets their direct3d working as well as wine has it working.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)