While still early in it’s development stages, Google’s upcoming Chrome OS is a neat OS to play with — especially on a netbook. While the Virtual Machine images floating around are nice for a glimpse, if you really want to immerse yourself in the Chrome OS experience it’s best to boot it from the metal. This can be achieved by “burning” this Chromium OS image to 3GB or greater USB or SD media. Here’s a torrent.





If you’re familiar with dd it’s simply a matter of downloading the torrent, unzipping and imaging the included chrome_os.img to your media. For example, dd if=’chrome_os.img’ of=/dev/sdb where /dev/sdb is the path of your removable media.

If you’re in Windows you’ll be delighted to find that the linked zip contains a copy of WinDD, as well as writing instructions. More information can be found at this makeuseof.com article. Important tidbits include the fact that the default user and password are chronos / password and that a terminal can be accessed by CTRL+ALT+T. Oh, and the xrandr command is available if your desired resolution isn’t detected automatically. The syntax is typically xrandr -s 1024×768 or similar.

Boot Google’s Chromium OS live from USB