Ubuntu & Chromium OS

After Google recently announced their intention of developing their latest venture, the Chromium OS, as an open source project, it has lead to cheers from all corners. An example of this openness was given at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the Canonical blog,

In the interest of transparency, we should declare that Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract. In our discussions, Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson made it clear that they want , wherever feasible, to build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention. This clear focus should benefit a wide variety of existing projects and we welcome it.

Something else that struck me on the issue is from this Chromium site,

Prerequisites
You need to have Linux. We currently support the following:

• Ubuntu (Hardy 8.04 or newer, Karmic 9.10 recommended)
• An account with root access (needed to run chroot and modify the mount table)
• Chromium prerequisites (needed to build a Chromium-based browser as part of building Chromium OS)

So, Google seems to be using a tried & tested platform as a foundation for their Chromium OS. The year 2010, seems to be getting interesting, with Lucid Lynx & Chromium OS. At least, we get to spend some good time; before the Mayans get the better of us, two years later.