Introduction

Ok, so you read our story on Google demoing their new Chrome OS Operating System, a system that completely relies on web based applications and now being the curious geek you want to try it out for yourself.  Well with it being an open source project Google have made the source code for Chrome OS available for download. Their open source variants of their software go by the moniker Chromium, so in this case the open source version of Chrome OS is actually called Chromium OS.

The problem though is that Chrome OS is not even at the beta stage yet and many people won't feel confident enough to put a pre beta product on their system and turn it into a bootable system. However all is not lost as gdgt.com have put together a Virtual Machine image for Chrome OS that you can use to get the OS working in a window on your desktop. As a result, I've put this guide together to show you how to set the Virtual Machine up and get it to run Chrome OS.

Virtual Machines (VMs for short) are a great way of testing new software or Operating Systems out without them affecting your core system. It's like creating an Operating System within your main Operating System. The virtual Operating System simply runs in a Virtual Machine application on your desktop.

There are two Virtual Machine applications available to you for this guide. VMware Player (version 3) and Sun's VirtualBox. If your on a Mac than you can use VMware Fusion. All but Fusion are free but here we'll be using VirtualBox since I had success in booting Chrome OS with that. Chrome OS running on VMware Player, failed to work for me, but you can try it if you like. Just make sure you use VMware Player version 3, prior versions won’t run .vmdk images.

Although VMs are a relatively safe way of testing new software you should know that you do this at your own risk. Chrome OS is not even at the beta stage yet, so depending on your particular setup, it will either work or it won't. There are no guarantees that what's shown here will actually work with your configuration. It's based purely on my experience, so without further ado lets get started.

Note:  I put this guide together so that your curiosity of Chrome OS could be served, like mine was when I followed someone else's guide to get Chrome OS working on my system. By the time you're finished with it you may feel it was something of a waste of time to try it out, so this is just a warning before you follow the rest of this guide: Chrome OS is severely lacking in the features and functionality departments right now and as such there really isn’t much to look at or do with it at the moment. - just a warning. This exercise will more than likely be a waste of time, but hey at least you would have used Chrome OS :).