"With all of the netbook-focused distribution updates, we found it time to run an onslaught of new benchmarks, comparing some of the leaders in this field along with running a couple full-blown desktop distributions for this round of Linux netbook benchmarking. Here are our benchmarks, including the world's first look at the Chromium OS (Chrome OS) system performance from the latest development build. Covered is everything from the video playback performance to encoding to battery power consumption and CPU/memory usage tests.
"The netbook we used for this Linux benchmarking fiesta was a Samsung NC10 comprised of an Intel Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.60GHz, the motherboard uses an Intel 945GME + ICH7-M Chipset with the standard 945 integrated graphics, 2GB of system memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, and a 1024 x 600 LCD panel. All of this hardware had worked fine, including the integrated 802.11g WiFi, with all distributions tested -- Chromium OS included.
"The operating systems we tested for this round of benchmarking included Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, Moblin 2.1, Fedora 12, Chromium OS, and openSUSE 11.2. We built Chromium OS from source at build 999.999.32609.201950-a1 without any external patches or configurations. All tested distributions were left in their default configurations, packages, and settings. The exceptions however with Chromium OS we needed to remount the root file-system in a read-write mode and add in the standard Ubuntu Karmic package repositories for which Google's operating system is based."
