Try the New Chromium OS with Aura Window Manager

Few days ago we coverd a story about the new changes in the Google Chrome OS, sadly not all of us can have the privilege to buy a brand new Chromebook nor we feel motivated to buy a new one just to check an Operating System.

Here is the open source build of Chromium OS by hexxeh, where you can have a feel of the new chromium OS and try it out installing it in a USB flash drive.


Here are two flavors of Chromium OS available for download from the hexxeh website. The vanilla builds are more closely aligned with upstream and are the most latest builds whereas the lime builds include broader hardware support and additional components, such as a Java plugin.

You can download the build of your choice by selecting the USB drive Icon in the download section, you can also download the Virtual Box images if you prefer to try it from your visualization application.The Download size of the image file is only 250MB.

To make your bootable USB drive on Linux follow the following Instructions.

Extract the IMG file from the downloaded archive, At the shell, run the dd command

• $ dd if=ChromeOS.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

If your USB drive is connected to /dev/sdX (X = a or b or c etc,)

To find out your actual USB dev ID use the following commands

• $ ls /media

This will list out the devices connected to your computer like

cdrom  cdrom0  cdrom1  floppy  floppy0  ABCD

ABCD is your USB drive, now run the following command

• $ mount | grep ABCD

This will flash the actual USB dev ID as follows

/dev/sdc on /media/ABCD type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=500,gid=500,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,flush)

Which means sdc is the target device for the dd command, you can also confirm it from the dmesg command at the terminal.

Now boot from the newly created Chromium OS USB stick!

Voila!