[geeks] Test Drive a Google Chrome Netbook

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On 12/12/2010 02:09 PM, Sven Aluoor wrote:
> Hi
>
> Google Chrome is total crap. You completely loose control over your
> data. Everything is stored in the cloud.
> Does Google Chrome have a Terminal Emulator for connecting to UNIX
> boxes? There are so many applications not available for Google Chrome.

Everything is stored where the application stores it.  So, if you don't 
trust Google Docs, then use Zoho writer.  Or wait for someone to come up 
with a similar service that uses a combination of HTML5 local storage 
and FTP to your home NAS.

As to a terminal emulator, that is up to someone providing an 
appropriate HTML5 terminal emulator.  That could work for SSHing into 
cloud VM systems at EC2 or perhaps you own colo'd server.  I'm not 
entirely sure how they would make such a system work with non-publicly 
available machines, but someone else might have better ideas.  Perhaps 
if you want to SSH into your home NAS, you will first need to install a 
local HTML5<->SSH service on a local machine.

Also, they may provide some extension method that could be used for SSH, 
if not now, then maybe in the future.

Finally, if I'm not mistaken, ChromeOS is also being released as the 
open source ChromiumOS.  If you want ChromeOS in general, but require 
specific changes, presumably at some point you will be able to zap you 
ChromeOS firmware and install a customized ChromiumOS image that someone 
distributed.

Google is making it clear that this is not yet for everyone.  Heck, I 
don't think they are eating their own dog food here yet.

Personally, my first thought was: How would I do without emacs?  Of 
course, someone has made a GTK/HTML frontend, so I suppose I could 
potentially use that with GTK emacs...