I was looking for more information about Googles Chromium OS and came across this website: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/download-google-chrome-os-and-run-on-a-real-computer/ They created a bootable image of Chromium OS which can be dumped to a 4gb or larger usb drive, sd card and so on. I dumped it to an old 4gb SD card, told my MSI Wind netbook to boot from the sd card and within a few seconds the Chromium login screen appeared. I logged on with username: chronos and password: password and was presented with a working Google Chrome. Webpages loaded very quickly as they do with Google Chrome on Windows (why don’t I use chrome as my main browser? ) Not much else I can say about it really, Chromium OS is in a very early beta stage and couldn’t realistically be used in an everyday environment unless all you needed to do was browse a couple of webpages. There are no buttons for basic commands like shutdown, sleep or re start. You can however press CTRL + ALT + T which will open the terminal, here you can type “sudo shutdown -h now” to shutdown, pressing the power button also did the same on my MSI Wind. Here is a pretty boring video of Chromium on the MSI Wind [video=youtube;k37agcHCKc0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k37agcHCKc0[/video] It can display the MSI Winds native 1024x600 screen resolution, sound and Ethernet work however wireless doesn’t at the moment. Im not sure about Bluetooth or the webcam as there’s no software to make use of them. There you go, the Google OS running on real hardware.
Google could do a great os based on linux if they wanted... this seems very restrictive but I do see why Google did it this way.
I remember reading Debian / Ubuntu somewhere, I cant find any reference to that anywhere now. Probably started from scratch with the Linux kernal as its very minimal.
This is quite interesting on how old Chrome OS was. I might install this on one of my old netbooks that I have lying around. Wish me the best of luck!
It's quite crazy how long ago I posted this. ChromeOS devices ended up been pretty good on tablet devices. Someone is still compiling newer builds you can install here: Chromium OS | ArnoldTheBats My mum got a Chromebook instead of another Android tablet as they can run Android apps now and get 7+ years of updates, which is way more than an Android tablet would ever get.
I still have to use my school Chromebooks, but because they're managed by the school, meaning that they make it suck. I remember using my brothers Chromebook, one of the old Samsung ones in aluminum. I liked the old look of the OS more than the modern one. Also, I tested this in a virtual machine and it could load Google and almost nothing else due to age.