I've recently been installing and using the new Google Chrome OS operating system on my Dell Mini 10v netbook.
On the evening of the announcement video, I built my own image from the source code and ran it from a USB stick. This first version had very little wireless hardware support, so I was limited to using a cabled connection at first.
A few weeks later, I stumbled across Hexxeh who was making customised builds of Chrome OS. He had included some recent developments by Dell engineers that enabled basic wireless support using the Broadcom chipset inside my Dell Mini 10v. It still wasn't perfect as there is an annoying 5 minute delay before any wireless networks appear in the connection manager, so means a long delay before you can actually do anything online.
To summarise, I like what Chrome OS is about, and with the recent addition to Extensions within the Chrome browser, I hope there will be some cool applications to play with soon. The startup and shutdown times are impressive, even with my netbook POST time delays. Hopefully, hardware support for my netbook will get better in time, or I may be forced to buy a dedicated Chrome OS netbook with ultra fast optimised BIOS startup times when they arrive at the end of the year.
