When Google announced the Chrome operating system back in July, they didn’t give out very many details on what to expect from it. Since Google open-sourced Chrome OS late last week, developers can now compile the operating system from source and try it out for themselves.
Google Chrome OS uses a Linux base, which then loads the Google Chrome web browser (which has been available for Windows since last year). That means that the Google Chrome web browser is basically your operating system. And despite speculation, Google Chrome OS has no relation to Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices.
Along with last week’s announcement, Google also released two videos detailing the purpose of Google Chrome OS. The two videos are shown below.
If you’re interested in trying out Google Chrome OS and don’t know how to compile it from source, you can download a VMware virtual machine image here (registration is required, unfortunately). Of course, to run the VMware image you’ll need to download/buy a virtualization program if you don’t already have one to run it in. Both VirtualBox and VMware Player support the image and can both be downloaded free of charge.
You most likely won’t be seeing Google Chrome OS pre-installed on any computers for about a year. Google Chrome OS is meant for netbooks and will require a solid state drive (flash-memory based hard drive) to run. Because of this, there most likely won’t be a threat to Windows on desktops, laptops, and netbooks with actual hard drives.
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