Testing Chromium OS

Google's Operating System is highly anticipated by the computing industry. The integration with your Google Account, 'instant on' internet access and 'no-fuss' computing promises a new age for netbooks. The OS is actually a product of the Chromium Project, the open source project behind Google's web browser Google Chrome. Once complete Google reckon boot time will be around 7 seconds. Chromium OS is completely different to the existing main stream operating systems, it stores no information locally and is entirely based on a webbrowser (Google Chrome to be precise).

Although it isn't officially out yet as a completed operating system it's source code is available (for free) to download. To then create a working distribution requires skill, time and effort. Fortunately there are several ways to download distributions of Chrome in it's current state of development. The easiest (and the method I used) is to run Parallels on an Intel powered Mac. From the File menu choose 'Download Chome OS' and your ready to start using it! I was very impressed with the automatic download and installation.

You can also download a build of Chrome OS called Flow from Hexxeh. You can install it using Parallels or VM Ware Fusion 3 on a Mac or with VirtualBox on Windows, Mac or Linux. I would imagine that you could also install this using Microsoft Virtual PC, but I've not tried it out.

Let me know your experiences testing Chromium OS using virtual machines on Twitter: @webwarpblog.