Difference between revisions of "About GalliumOS"

Revision as of 20:47, 4 November 2015

GalliumOS is a fast and lightweight Linux distro for ChromeOS devices.

Why Linux?

More applications

Linux can run many different types of applicatons. No matter what you're trying to do, an application exists for Linux. ChromeOS is very limited. Sure, NaCl (Native Client) brings the ability to run native code to ChromeOS, but that's a hack at best, and there's still no good software to take advantage of it. With Linux you can install any Linux compatible software, totally natively. Firefox, Transmission (BitTorrent), LibreOffice, Steam, VLC Media Player, Kodi Media Center, the GIMP, VirtualBox, and many more are available on Linux to do things that simply aren't possible on ChromeOS.

More control

Why GalliumOS as opposed to other Linux distros?

Better Performance

GalliumOS includes optimizations that eliminate system stalls and improve overall responsiveness. Alternative kernel schedulers have been included: BFS for process scheduling and BFQ for I/O scheduling. The reason for these is to prevent system stalls due to I/O and processes hogging the CPUs. Also there have been removed some services to improve the boot time and reduce the number of things running since some chromebooks/boxes only have 2GB of memory. There have been tweaked a few things for power saving and performance:

• The kernel watchdog timer has been disabled.
• HDMI polling (that doesn't prevent HDMI connections from working as they work fine)has been disabled.
• It has been reduced the minimum GPU frequency.
• Its included zram for swap that is a much faster swap than to disk
• Its has been hacked the installer to stop making a swap partition since we use zram, ChromeOS also uses zram.
• There have been stripped out some unnecessary things from the kernel to improve boot time
• Possibly controversial - It has been removed lightdm in favor of SLiM to reduce system resources. We also chose slimlock as a replacement for light locker and xscreensaver.
• We use compton as the compositor to provide tear free drawing of the desktop windows. This is supposed to perform better than turning on Intel's tear free option in the driver, especially because there is already a compositor running.

Improved Touchpad

Integrated ChromeOS mouse driver provides a touchpad experience similar to ChromeOS

Built on Xubuntu

A fast, lightweight, beautiful, and fully functional desktop

Bug Fixes

For the issues that affect ChromeOS devices and are not found in standard distros