In a lot of cases you wish to develop to the new Chromebook but don’t have the hardware or just want to be more productive while working on your 8-core linux box… In these cases, there is a good option to run the latest ChromeOS inside Virtualbox (or VMware if you have it). A quick reminder, Chromium OS (which is the open source version of ChromeOS) is a project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. In our tutorial here we will use Chromium OS images.
The steps to follow
- Download VirtualBox.
- You can build your own OS if you wish, just go to: chromium-os and read the details.
However, there is an easy way – just download an image of Chromium OS – I have one for you here or just type http://bit.ly/crOS-16.
And this guy is creating lots of fresh images of Chromium OS every day. So if you want the real ‘development’ (=alpha) version of it – check it out. - Open the VirtualBox and click on ‘New’ button (upper left corner) – You will get this:
Choose Linux and Ubuntu and click ‘Continue’.
Next you need to set the memory – make sure to set an amount that you can devote to VirtualBox without killing your machine. Something around 1500MB should work. If you have more, even better.
The last part of this wizard is to choose the image file. Click on the radiobox and point to the place you save the image file of ChromeOS.
Next dialog will show you a summary of all the details and after you will click ‘Create’ you are good to go!
Tips
- Make sure to open ‘Setting’ of your new virtual machine and under ‘Processor’ click the PAE checkbox. If you won’t do that, you will get the ‘black screen of death’ and the machine won’t start.
- If you getting errors while loading – sometimes it’s due to lack of memory. Try to close some applications and start the virtual box again.
- Make sure you have something like 100mb of memory to the ‘video memory’ under the display section in the settings.
Ido Green 
Very nice. Thanks.
Just wanted to verify that best-apps4.me is your domain. It looks kinda sketchy.. 🙂
Yep… it’s an old domain of a friend.
I wanted to use dropbox – but didn’t had too mach free space over there.
is it correct that the LIVE USB image of chromiumOS wont work with Virtual Box? I cant get it to work. Now i am downloading the purposed img file. lets see if it works than…
thank you very much for your tutorial.
Ya… the liveUSB image is not a VritualBox so it won’t work. But, as you wrote… try the VBox image and it should work for you in no time.
If you have any issues, please let me know – I’ll do my best to help 🙂
I downloaded this image and got it running in VirtualBox- thanks for making it available.
I can only log in as Guest. How can I get logged in with a more privileged account?
Why can’t you log with your gmail user?
Yes, I figured out that was what I had to do. (New to ChromeOS…)
whats the password?
What’s the password?
Hey Lizzi,
You can use your own gmail user name and password.
I’m having problems adding a user. It asks me to connect to a network first. I am already connected (Ethernet). What could be the problem?