Google Chrome OS to Be Launched Next Week

The highly anticipated operating system should be available to everyone soon enough

Google's most hotly anticipated project, the brand-new, web-based operating system Chrome OS, is about to become a reality if rumors about its impending launch as soon as next week turn out to be true. When it first announced the project, Google said that the first public release should come this fall so this wouldn't be too much of a surprise. There's not much info aside from the fact that it will be launched and, in fact, any type of details about Chrome OS have been scarce so far, so there's plenty of anticipation in the tech crowd to see just what Google cooked up.

The rumor comes from the TechCrunch blog which has been on somewhat of a roll lately with rumors about Google. Adding the fact that we already knew that Chrome OS would hit at around this date, this rumor seems solid enough. But don't get your hopes up yet, just because Google is launching the OS doesn't exactly mean that you'll be able to pop it into any computer or laptop and run it. It's likely that it's at a pretty unpolished state and Google previously said that Chrome OS wouldn't be ready for the market at least until the second half of 2010.

Hardware support is one of the biggest issues at this point. Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel so, in theory, at the low level, it should have some very good driver support. It's unclear though what kind of changes Google has made and how far along the other components of the OS are to take advantage of the hardware capabilities. Google is building Chrome OS with netbooks in mind, so chances are that some of the more popular machines like Asus' Eee PC will probably work right off the bat.

But even if you can install it and run it, it doesn't mean that there will be much to look at. From a user's view point, Chrome OS will most likely be very lacking at this point. This release is meant to get developers familiar with the platform and give hardware manufacturers enough time to get used to it, before presumably starting to ship machines with Chrome OS. Anyway, even so there's plenty to be excited about, we'll finally get a look at the mysterious GUI Google has been working on and see how the company has adapted the more system-oriented tasks to an OS designed for the cloud. There have been some clues already, but the speculation should end soon enough.