Dec
3
Posted by Jeff on Thursday, December 3, 2009 - 9 41 pm
Like any good geek I took the time to play with Chrome OS once it came out by using GDGT's virtual machine. After playing with it I was impressed but could not get a full impression as it was in a Virtual environment.
Over the last week many USB keys have been created and a "Diet Chrome OS USB Key" was created. Below are the instructions I used (H/T Taranfx)
Windows
Unzip using WinRar, Download Image Writer and launch it, select the image (chromiumos.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.
Mac
Firstly, unmount the drive you want to install Chromium OS to. Place the downloaded file onto your desktop. Open System Profiler, click USB on the list at the side and then select the entry that represents your USB disk. Now look for the BSD Name column (http://bit.ly/5mG4WK). Remember what is written here. In my case, it is disk1, but in yours it may be different. Take care here as if you get it wrong, it could seriously mess things up. Once you have this, open up Terminal and
type the following commands.
cd Desktop
tar -zxvf chromiumos.tar.gz
cd chromiumos
For the next command, replace X with the name of the disk you found earlier, ie disk1.
sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4m
This command will ask you to enter your password (the same one you enter when installing software for example), type it in and press enter. This command will take a while to run, about 20 minutes for me, and then will give you your shell prompt back once it has finished. Once it has, you can remove your USB drive and boot from it (but not on your Mac because I’ll tell you now that won’t work, yes I tried it)
Troubleshooting:
If It says “Resource Busy“!, You forgot to dismount the drive. Do this, then retype the command and you should be fine.
Linux
Extract chromiumos.img and run the following command in the same directory as the file, where X is the device name of your USB drive.
sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4M
Once the command finishes, you can then boot from the USB drive.
Proof to image of it running for me is here.
