Hope all of you heard of release of Google Chrome OS.
It’s light weight open source operating system which designed to work with web applications. If you want to know more about the project you can visit their official website( chromium.org) . So that I can keep this post as simple as possible. If you want to know about Google Chrome OS in 3 minutes, you must watch this video!
Before starting I must say that, YOU MUST HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION TO GET THINGS GET GOING! (I hope it’s already there as you’re reading this blog!)
To install google chrome there are two different ways.
- Prepare a linux installed machine
- Get the source tarball and build tools
- Build the source (takes around 10gb of your HDD).
- Create the chromium image and install it. Details can be found here
You can install the image natively in a machine or you can install in a virtual machine. VM’s are a bit more convenient as you PC is not all affected whatever do in that.
The second way is more simple. As someone already took all the pains to download and build the source and prepared the OS image.
I am approaching the second method which is more simple and convenient.
- Visit http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/
- Download the OS image (You may need to create a login for downloading (you can also use your facebook to authenticate it.
- Get VMWare Player from VMWare website.
- Install VMWare Player
- Unzip the vmware virtual disk image (vmdk) you’ve downloaded from gdgt.com
There you go. You’ve all ingredients for your installation. Now let’s start the installation. note that I have tried this in Windows 7 and VMWare Player 3.0
1. Create New Virtual Machine
2. Choose for “I will install operating system later”
3. Choose Other as your operating system
4. Name your virtual hdd (we can change this later and use the downloaded vmdk image). The VMPlayer new interface is not that friendly.
5. Press Next and leave your Options default
6. Finish your setup
7. Now you can see your Virutal Machine in the VMWare Player window. Now you need little bit more customization and we need to map the vmdisk we’ve. Choose Edit Virtual machine settings
8. Configure RAM and VMDK
a. Given more room to run the Virtual machine. Given 1024 MB of my RAM to run the Virtual Machine
b. Remove the default HDD
9. Click on Add and Choose for Hard Disk
10. Choose for existing virtual disk
11. Browse to vmdk file you downloaded (unzipped)
12. VMWare player may ask to convert it to new format. Do this according to your preference. but I lft the image untouched and kept in old format
13. This is an option step. Only required if VMWare Prompts about vmdisk usage issues if vmdk image is kept in different hard drive than the default HDD. Click on the “Advanced Button of virtual machine settings window.
14. In my system VMWare asked me to choose IDE0:0 as default for the image. This might be different for you. Do as VMWare explains in error message (if occured) when starting up virtual machine
15. Finish the setup and now go back to your Virtual Machine Choose to “Play Virtual Machine”. You can see its booting up
16. You can use your Google ID (or Gmail ID ) and password to login
16. You can see the default Google Home Page when you login
17. Click on the Chrome Button on right top corner to see your default web applications.
18. You can access your own stuffs as you’re seeing.
The internet access was too slow in the virtual machines. I will share more screenshots later. Anyway you’re there in your Chrome OS right? So share your experience and stories. Put them as comments or put in your blog twitter anywhere you find comfortable. Signing Off Chrome OS. Bye till I sign in again.
