Who wants to wait until 2010 to get a look at the Chrome OS?
You've read all about the Chrome OS and are really interested in taking the software for a test drive. Unfortunately, Google is sticking with its vague release date of "before the end of 2010" which means you're not going to get your hands on the operating system anytime soon, right? Wrong. The Chrome OS is available to download right now and with the help of VMWare, you can try the software right now.
When Google announced Chrome yesterday morning the company also released the code for the OS, explaining that development will be done in the open from this week on. The Chromium OS project includes Google's current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development.
As soon as it was released, GDGT engineer Jon Ursenbach got to work compiling the code, trying to see if he could get an instance of Chromium OS running in a virtual machine. And, lucky for us, he did!
You can download a copy of the virtual machine to use in VMware, VirtualBox, and on a USB drive here (300MB compressed / 700MB uncompressed): http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/
Exciting stuff. Let us know if you download Chrome OS and how it works out for you.
Of course i'm downloading it via Windows.
Hmm some one gave you thumbs down...Well I thumbs up to get rid of it because I agree...And think this guy has the right idea.
I didn't thumb either of you up nor down, but I figured I'd throw my perspective out there anyway... I think Chrome OS would be fine for netbooks, I might even buy a netbook one of these days, but my desktop takes priority. I too love control, and am hesitant to store sensitive data in the cloud. But I CAN see a use for Chrome OS, it'll just never be my main OS, but rather something I'd put on a device I consider more of a toy. I mean as a developer I can't see myself writing code and compiling on Chrome OS for example. But I can see me using it on a device that I carry everywhere to browse the internet when I'm not near a PC, etc... Anyway, it's worth a look in my opinion.
You can run vmware on pretty much anything I think... I'm running it in linux right now (I mostly use windows OS's, but I happen to be using the linux version of vmware workstation as my host right now). I don't know anything about vmware player, I think it's free though and they should have a windows and linux version (probably works on macs too).
btw, has anyone figured out how to "power-off" the OS, aside from closing the VM?
Nope, let me know if you figure it out...
Apparently the virtual box image isn't working. However, if you download the vmware image you can still use it in virtual box (or at least that's what has been said, I'm download it to test right now).
Ill post back once it's done downloading
Download the vmdk image it will work on Virtual box, you get very slow response though. We have to wait for the live-cd version I guess.
Use your Google account to login,If you don’t have one open one here.
Remember the vmdk is compressed; you can use WinZip, WinAce or WinRAR to uncompressed.
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It doesn’t seem to work on VMware Player 3 or VM Workstation 7.