Hacker News Reader

Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

When Chrome OS was first announced, I wanted to try it out. Unfortunately every time I try, I can't get it to run in VirtualBox. The hexxeh builds are old (April 2013) and there's no ISO I can download. Has anyone else had success in running a recent, stable build in VirtualBox?

View on HN

The easiest way to try the ChromeOS UI on another platform is currently on Windows 8, where if your regular Chrome build is set as the default browser it will run the ChromeOS desktop environment/window manager in Metro mode (you have to close all the desktop windows for this to work).

Likely way more work than you're interested in but on Linux:

Follow most of the steps on this page: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxBuildInstructio... then:

  export GYP_DEFINES=chromeos=1
  gclient runhooks
  ninja -C out/Release chrome   # May take a while!
  ./out/Release/chrome

... this produces a build of Chrome very similar to the one run in ChromeOS (we use it for 99% of UI development & testing on our Linux workstations). You can run this and get a feel for the desktop environment, window manager, etc. Similar steps will work on Windows but with use_aura=1 defined in GYP_DEFINES, and chrome run with --open-ash on the command line.

Last December, I played with building ChromeOS from source for a $449 touchscreen Asus laptop from Microsoft Store. It's easy enough if you just follow the directions on the ChromiumOS website. But I found keeping builds updated was a bigger hardship, and didn't want to make my own continuous build system. So I returned the laptop and this month bought an Acer C720P. Much happier.

Booting Chrome OS in a VM will likely disappoint, since you won't have graphics acceleration (Aura will be slow) and you'll be using the BIOS boot method (which chainloads to one of the GPT partitions containing the kernel and is generally slow compared to a direct uBoot (ARM) or Core Boot (x86_64) boot).

If you're in America, I'd recommend trying a Chromebook out at a local Best Buy. Failing that, throwing an old Hexxeh USB build on a USB key and booting it will give you a first approximation, but you'll miss out on things like the proprietary EME extensions that enable Netflix and other little details that make Chromebooks usable.

Try a build from here: http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/

Why not grab VMware?

I got the hexxeh build running fine on VMWare (Workstation, but it should work fine in Player) a couple of days ago.

All I had to do was change ethernet config in the .vmx file as it wasn't picking up the virtual adapter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com