Chromium OS : How to boot on VMware

Google has released Chromium OS source codes. OS is based on linux. If you are linux geek , you can easily compile the os and boot. What if you are not a linux guy.

Here how I managed to boot chromium OS virtual machine (in the case of this article VMWare). If you don’t want to buy VMWare just to test Chrome OS you can download trial version of VMWare. Here is how you can boot chromium os on VMWare Fusion(Mac osx) (VMware Player on wondows) .

Thanks for gdgt for providing the chrome os vmdt (virtual disk file), which can be used to run chrome os on vmware. Before continuing you must have a chrome os vmdt file. You can get the file from gdgt site (http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/). 

Here are the steps from VMWare fusion (MacOsx). More or less applies for VMWare Player(Windows). 1. Open VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine library which looks like below.

2. Click New on the above window to continue.

3. Click Continue

4. Choose Operating System (since chrome os is built upon linux I installed it on linux ubuntu virtual machine, will work on other linux too.
Linux->Ubuntu.


5. Change the Save as field as your desire. In my case I changed it to Chrome OS.


Click Continue further. Expand the Advanced disk options. Check “Use an existing virtual disk” .

Now select Other option and point to the location where your vmdt file is saved on your hard drive and select it.

Now click Continue


Click finish to start virtual machine. When started it looks like below.


Set Bridged network option (not NAT) so that you can use internet connection of main OS within the Guest OS(Chrome OS).


You can use your existing google account to login to the system. After logging in the OS looks like below.