Try Chrome OS on any machine

Google Chrome OS has been making the news columns since awhile now and Google is infact giving away free Chrome Notebooks for beta testing, however only if you’re in US.

So what if you’re outta US? Or what if you don’t wanna wait for your name to be randomly selected from all those million requests?

Well, here’s how you can give Google Chrome OS a try and you don’t even need any additional hardware.

But of course, you’ll need a 2-gig flash drive (USB drive) as far as hardware goes.

Download this image – this is a stable and tested build. If you are looking for something more adventurous, you can download some dirty, untested builds of the same here.

But take my word and go for the stable release. The dirty ones turned out to be really dirty for me. Wasted like hours, let alone some precious bandwidth.

After you’re done downloading image, use Win32 Disk Imager to burn this to a 2-gig flash drive. Download Win32 Imager here.

Once burnt, restart your PC and change the boot settings of the BIOS at the restart. Usually this can be done by pressing F12 key. Alter the boot priorities and make USB HDD the first choice preference.

Plug in the USB and you should be all set to go.

An image like the one on right will welcome you. You should have an ethernet connection to log in. Well, wifi didn’t particularly work well and it won’t, at least the first time. But once logged in, you can alter the settings and browse via wifi.

Log in with your Google account and if you don’t have one, make one before starting the procedure it.

And there you go, here’s a browser which in fact, is an, Operating system!

To be clear, this isn’t actually *the* Chrome OS. Chrome OS is for now running only on its particular hardware. However, this is just like Chrome OS. Chrome OS is built on an open source project Chromium OS. Anyone can get the source and build a Chrome Os and try it. Or instead of building it yourself, you can follow this simple procedure and play with it!

Wait for tomorrow when I come up with a full Google Chrome OS hands on .

P.S.

1.) 2-gig flash drives are alright but I’d recommend to use one with a bigger capacity. Some forums did point issues with flash drives of 2-gigs. I personally tried it on an 8-gig drive.

2.) There seems to be some issues with Dell machines. And so if you’re a Dell user, it is recommended not to waste time and bandwidth of yours for now cos it just won’t work.