Balkenende realiseert zich dat de PvdA gezien de peilingen niet op nieuwe verkiezingen zit te wachten - net zo min als hijzelf trouwens. Toch kan de PvdA- die immers op het Irakonderzoek had aangedrongen - bijna niet anders dan aan de forse kritiek van Davids politieke consequenties verbinden. Balkenende moest zijn coalitiepartner dus een vluchtroute bieden.

Die nooduitgang creëerde de premier gisteren door het rapport achteloos als "een mening" terzijde te schuiven, en daarbij zijn rol als eerste minister in het toenmalige kabinet voorrang te geven boven zijn positie als premier namens de huidige coalitie. Zijn optreden leidde tot woedende reacties bij de linkse oppositie. Ook de PvdA trok zich onmiddellijk terug voor spoedoverleg, en eiste een nieuwe verklaring van de minister-president.

Balkenende zette het toneelstukje gisteravond nog even voort, maar hij zal een dezer dagen wel door het stof gaan voor zijn vermeende faux pas. Daarmee gunt hij de PvdA voor het oog van de camera een overwinning, die de sociaal-democraten de gelegenheid biedt om de coalitie zonder gezichtsverlies overeind te houden.

(Of course, since it's a precompiled image, it's impossible to tell whether it has been tampered with. Some malicious hacker may have slipped in a key logger or whatnot. Chrome OS requires you to log in using your Google credentials, so you may want to create a new account to make sure your real account stays safe. That's what I did, anyway.)

I fired up VirtualBox and created a new machine. I gave it 1GB of RAM and told VirtualBox we'd be running Debian, the distro Chrome OS is based on. I pointed VirtualBox to the image, and started the machine.

In Thursday's demo, Chrome OS took 7 seconds to boot. Running on my virtual machine, it needed just under 18 seconds. Here's the login screen:

In Chrome OS, there's no distinction between your local system and the Internet. Chrome OS is essentially Google's web browser Chrome running on a Linux kernel. The applications you're running are all web based and displayed in browser tabs, and your data is stored in the cloud. So I logged in using the Google account I just created.

That took me to a Chrome web browser tab that loaded my pristine Gmail inbox. More interesting however is the Chrome OS logo in the upper left corner of the screen. It's the tab that gives you access to other web applications Google has preinstalled on your system preselected for use in the Chrome OS cloud.

These applications are apparently put on a web page using Google's Short Links service, which is normally part of Google Apps. I suppose that's why I had to sign in again:

Which took me to the actual applications:

Most of the icons I clicked, opened a browser tab to load a familiar website like Gmail, Google Calendar or YouTube. Clicking 'Contacts' however opened a 'panel', a small overlay that loaded my Google contacts and let me chat with them using Google Talk, much the same way Google's IM service works from within Gmail:

I also tried the chess game that Google's Sundar Pichai demoed. It's a Flash game, and you can make it run full screen by pressing F11:

Chrome has Flash 10 installed. Running Chrome OS on a virtual machine is very likely the culprit, but I found that Flash applications consistently made the system become unresponsive. Both the chess game and my unsuccessful attempts at watching a video on YouTube ended in me rebooting the system. This also happened when I tried to use the Calculator application, which just opened an empty panel, no Flash involved.

Surfing the Internet, I stumbled upon one final interesting bit of information: Chrome's user agent string. Unlike the Chromium build I'm running on my regular Ubuntu desktop, it does not identify the OS as Linux, but as 'CrOS'.

The issues I encountered most likely were caused by the VM. But instability aside, running Chrome OS is, frankly, not very interesting (yet).

I'm sure that will change after another year(!) of development, when netbooks become available that are designed to be used with the OS.

But right now, Chrome OS is basically I geeky way to run the Chrome browser and use the web applications you're already familiar with.

The user agent string is cool, though.

If you're a Firefox user like me, and you find the new notification bar distracting, it's quite easy to get rid of. Just find your user style sheet (it's called userContent.css, and it's located in the chrome folder inside your Firefox profile folder), and add the following lines of code:

@-moz-document domain(twitter.com) {
	div#new_results_notification {
		display: none !important;
	}
}

If userContent.css doesn't exist, just create it. Restart Firefox, and the notification bar should be gone. You will still be able to see your unread tweet count in the page title, though.

(I wrote about userContent.css (in Dutch) when it was first introduced in 2005)