I have been meaning to get a look at the Chrome operating system after the news that it had been released in its current beta form. I saw a reference to a virtual machine image of it here and if you follow that you should be able to download a zip file with a virtual disk image (vmdk for vmware). Using the vmware vclient connected to an ESX host – transfer the file to a new directory under one of the datastores.
Then create a new Custom machine (you won’t get the option to pick up the disk image if you use the create default machine option. I used 2GB memory and 2 processors and operating system other as the choices with 1 network card. Once created the startup completed in a few seconds with a blue logon screen allowing me to use my google account details to log in and lo – my google mail account running in the Chrome OS.
I have to say it did surprise me how straightforward the process was – how things are actually working under the covers is probably the basis for another article at a later stage but for now I will be using it as a test platform to see whats there in terms of functionality. The interface is basically a browser with mail and google docs available as tabs – as well as calendar. The “new” bit is the circle which opens a tab with links to other applications such as Picasa and Youtube among others with a banner line saying “Design changes are likely blah blah blah” so its a work in progress.
But so far so good – its booted and stayed working so lets see what else happens….