Google Chromium OS on Your Notebook ...

Google’s Chrome OS has been in  the lime light for a while now,but many of us have come to assume that the operating system is only available to those using Google’s

Chromebooks. Samsung and Acer are the two brands selling Chromebooks in international markets. So what do you do in such cases, where an operating system that’s deemed to be free isn’t really available on Google’s site? Well, you download it from a third party developer’s page. In this guide, we’ll show you how to download and

install a Chromium OS build on a USB drive. It’s quite simple really, and it doesn’t take more than five minutes once you have the 240-odd MB image downloaded. Here’s what you’ll need to get Chromium OS running.

·         The Chrome OS image. In this case, we shall use the Hexxeh’s Chromium OS build. You can download it from

            http://chromeos.hexxeh.net

·         A USB flash drive. We recommend using a 4 GB flash drive, at least.

·         A utility called Windows Image Writer, which can be downloaded from https://launchpad.net/win32- image-writer

Choose the download version for the Chromium OS and use the Win32 Disk Imager utility to create the bootable USB pen drive.

Hexxeh is the developer behind the Hexxeh Chromium builds. The site contains a bunch of builds and the ‘Flow’ build, though stable, is a little outdated. The newer builds can be found at http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/vanilla.php.  Remember that the Chromium builds aren’t official stable builds, so there are bound to be some issues and glitches that you’ll notice while using it. They might even offer better compatibility with your hardware. Find the build you need and download it. The download size of the archives is likely to be between 240 and 327 MB. The downloadable images are available as TAR or GZ files, which can be extracted using a compression tool such as 7zip or Winrar. The file within

the archive should be an IMG file. Extract it to your desktop. Now, we have to dump this IMG file on a USB flash drive. Before you write the Chromium OS image to the flash drive, ensure that you have saved all the data from it securely. Next, start the Windows

Image Writer utility and select the drive letter for the flash drive. Choose the IMG file you extracted and click on the ‘Write’ button. This process should take a few minutes. Chromium OS will then be installed on your flash drive. Next, boot your notebook or desktop PC using the flash drive. Ensure that you have enabled USB booting from the BIOS. Plug in the USB flash drive on your PC and power it on. The flash drive should automatically boot into Chromium OS. Once booted, simply login using your Google account and you should be able to install Web apps available on the Chrome store and use your own notebook as if it were a Chromebook.