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.
