Running Chromium OS in a virtual machine on your Windows PC is useful, and it gives you a good idea of what it might be like to own a Chromebook laptop or a Chromebox PC. How do you get it running on a real laptop or desktop PC, though? This is where Hexxeh’s USB version of Chromium OS comes in useful. Download the USB memory stick version from the website (chromeos.hexxeh.net) and then copy the .img file out of the zip archive. It doesn’t matter where you save it to, and it can be left in the Downloads folder or put on the desktop.
This .img file is designed to be written to a USB flash drive that has a capacity of at least 4GB. It will work on any USB stick, but obviously the faster it is, the faster Chromium OS will run. You need a utility to write the .img file to the USB stick, so go to (sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager) and download
Win32 Disk Manager (don’t worry it works in 64-bit Windows too). Extract the files from the zip archive, plug in the USB stick and run Win32DiskImager.exe. Select the image file you downloaded from Hexxeh, check that the drive selected is the right one, and then simply write it to the USB stick. This will copy Chromium OS onto it and make it into a bootable device. Afterwards, you can use it to boot up a laptop or a desktop PC
The PC or laptop probably won’t automatically boot from the flash drive and you may have to press a key. Pressing F12 on my PC just after switching on, for example, displays a list of boot devices from which i can select the USB stick. Your PC or laptop may use a different hotkey. You might even have to enter the BIOS setup by pressing F1, Del or whatever, just after switching on and then select the USB stick as the boot device in the boot order settings.
Chromium OS booted from a USB stick will not touch the hard disk, so it won’t affect Windows. You can keep it this way or you can try to install it to the hard disk drive. Hexxeh’s Chromium OS changes every day, so there’s no guarantee this is possible with whatever version you have. Not all laptops and desktops are compatible either. If you want to try it, though. press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go to the command prompt and then use chronos/facepunch to log in. At one time you could simply type ‘install’ to install it, but then things changed and you had to type ‘crosh’ and then ‘install’.
Whether you run Chromium OS from a USB stick or install it to the hard disk, remember to add the missing extras in the some way as with VirtualBox.
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