Sorry for the cheekily dismissive title there - Google's Chrome OS is of course a very big deal and in a year or so, when we start seeing it sold with new netbooks, there'll no doubt be much excitement. For now though big G has generated quite a bit of early interest by releasing the open source code for all to have a little play around with...
As a Chrome fan I decided to have a tinker myself, which is how I came across this great Techcrunch step-by-step tutorial on how to set Chrome OS up on a virtual machine to test it out. I must admit this process was completely new to me, but nonetheless I managed it ok in around half an hour (TC reckons it takes 15 mins, but i made a few wrong turns on the way...)
Anyway, the simple summary is that Chrome OS running off a virtual machine is basically identical to simply using the Chrome browser - so don't expect anything super exciting there (there is a battery life indicator in the window, which Chrome doesn't boast but to be honest this wasn't exactly a revolutionary experience for me).
However then I realised that the real benefit from the exercise was that I'd quite quickly and painlessly learnt how to use VirtualBox - a great free program for running virtual machines and testing out other OS options etc... For this alone the Techcrunch post (with lots of helpful screenshots) is fantastic. So nice one for that guys - and as for Chrome OS, we will be covering that more and more as it gets closer to launch.
Dejan Levi
