Chromiums Aura on Ubuntu

There's been quite a bit of interest in Aura, the display manager for Chromium OS. Its simple, sleek, and very very beautiful. So obviously there's been quite a bit of interest in porting it to other Linux distros and using it as a normal display manager. Unfortunately, its not very simple and hasn't really been done. Well actually it had been done, but not so many people notice it. In fact its running on Mac OS, Windows, Android, iOS, and most Linux distros. In fact if your using the chrome browser now (67% of my readers are) then your looking at aura. Aura is used to draw pretty much the whole chrome window including widgets. And if your using chrome in windows 8 metro mode then you should also see the rest of aura that you see on chrome is like the bottom bar and launcher. So, seems pretty simple to get aura working as a full display manager on Linux. I did it on Ubuntu 12.04. All you have to do is create an .xinitrc file, and in the exec section where you'd normally put something like 'gnome-session' you put the binary executable for the chrome browser, followed by all the handles you want to run it with. '--login-manager' is recommended its pretty self explanatory. Then if you change to a different vty, then kill lightdm with 'sudo service lightdm stop' and start X with chrome with startx then it should boot into your nice shiny aura interface. Bingo.

I know this post might be hard to follow its not my best but I haven't slept and I'm still working on this. Hopefully I'll update later.

Chromium OS on Dell laptop

So I have this Dell laptop (inspiron 3537) that I've been trying to get Chromium OS onto and last night I finally succeeded. I had a bit of trouble doing it not quite sure why. I started off by using the amd64-generic overlay when compiling the code which is the overlay used for the 64 bit images found across the internet (hexxeh, Arnoldthebats) and found that for various reasons it didn't boot. Although since then I've discovered some stuff that may work to fix that. Any way, I started looking at some of the other overlays and what sort of systems they're built on and what do you know the closest thing to my laptop is the link overlay, aka chromebook pixel. The Pixel has an Intel core i5 CPU (ivy bridge) my laptop has core i5 haswell. Both use integrated Intel graphics. So I used the link overlay and straight away it booted perfectly. In fact the only thing that doesn't work is WiFi and Bluetooth which is a common problem. Everything else works. Sleep, sound, etc. So it got me thinking, if your computer won't boot Chromium OS, try other builds. If your not into building yourself then I'll try and put some builds up on the internet somewhere.

What I'm going to try now is making a new board overlay that uses link as it's parent and get rid of the touchscreen stuff (don't need it) and add drivers for my WiFi card.

About me:

Hi there

I'm Gav Mickey, AKA codewolfe. General tech geek (but not geeky) specialising in designing and making Operating Systems. I have experience in developing the Android Open Source Project and I've played around with rooting, cracking, and generally making Android my bitch. I've also been digging into Chromium OS recently and hopefully soon I'll be committing some changes although what I've mostly been doing with it is porting it to my 2013 Nexus 7. Thats been consuming most of my time so my blogs probably going to be full of stuff about Chromium OS. 
Aside from that I'm a big linux user/developer. I've been throwing together a few hand built distros (built from the kernel up not forked off another distro) for different purposes mostly just to see what my limits are. More recently I've been highly customising all the open source packages that make a distro in order to get a more efficient system and its been working great. Funny how much useless shit (subjective) runs on even the tightest built Operating Systems. 
If your still reading (congratulations) then i thought I'd just list all the stuff I'm working on:

• Chromium OS (porting to Android devices)
• Android (rooting)
• Linux (building base systems)
• Mac OS (making it a little more permissive and open)
• iOS (app development)
• KOS (pronounced chaos its the name of the main distro I'm building)