Have you heard about Google’s upcoming operating system ChromeOS and are willing to test it on your computer? Then follow this guide to make it working! ChromeOS is intended to include only the Chrome browser and is only able to run web applications, thus targeting users who spend most of their time in the internet.
Test and use ChromeOS without installing it:
Download a compiled release of ChromeOS. This is the easiest way, you may of course compile it on your own, but that is not part of this tutorial. Use the torrent mirror for fastest downloads. Once it’s done, unpack the image file (ChromeOS-Cherry.img)
Connect a USB memory stick (at least 1GB) to your computer
Download and unpack Win32DiskImager and launch Win32DiskImager.exe. Click on the little folder symbol and select your image file unpacked in step 1. Select the proper drive letter of your USB memory stick in the Device section. Then click Write and confirm the window warning your about a potential physical corruption on your device.
Once it finished writing, unplug your USB device and plug it into the computer you want to test ChromeOS on. Make sure your computer is configured to boot from USB devices as first priority. If your computer is a netbook (e.g. Asus Eee PC), try the steps under Prepare the Asus Eee PC to boot from USB devices in my tutorial on Windows 7 on the Eee PC. Most other computers will have a similar BIOS configuration, though.
Boot from the USB device and wait a few seconds. ChromeOS shouldn’t take long to boot (around 5 seconds on my Eee PC 900).
Login using facepunch as both username and password.
There should be three symbols at the top right corner. The first is showing your battery status (in running ChromeOS on a laptop), the second your WiFi and Ethernet configuration and the third some menus. Click the second one and connect to your WiFi/Ethernet network. This is really necessary since all applications in ChromeOS are web-based!
Enjoy ChromeOS!
Troubleshooting:
I am connected via WiFi/Ethernet but can’t open websites. This may be due to a misconfiguration in your network settings. Sadly, ChromeOS currently has no GUI to configure it, but you can try to do it with the terminal. Press CTRL + ALT + T to open terminal, and go on using Linux commands (e.g. ip addr to see your network configuration, ping to ping other network devices, sudo bash for root user, …)
My screen resolution is not at its maximum. I had this problem a few times and there was no way of fixing it (xrandr in terminal didn’t work and told me that VGA1 was disconnected). Probably ChromeOS has some problems with the display drivers, but restarting the computer always helped.
Flash/YouTube videos are lagging. This happens probably also due to bad/missing video drivers. I don’t think there is a solution for it except finding and installing fitting display drivers for your device and Linux on your own. Hopefully Google will fix this in the final release.
This tutorial will show you how to shrink your copy of Windows 7 so that it will be as small as 3.8GB and will fit on the 4GB SDD of the Asus Eee PC 700 and 900!
Now follow the steps below to make your own customized version of Windows 7 for your Netbook. This is quite complicated compared to a normal installation of Windows 7, and perhaps there will be an easier way in the future, but until now, this is better than nothing, and you can have the other SDD for all the stuff you want to have on your netbook.
Thanks to Basti756 for this awesome tutorial! See the proof that it is working below:
Get Windows 7
You can download Windows 7 Beta 1 either from the official Microsoft Windows 7 download site or via Torrent, which should be 100% legal since the official version has been released for public testing. Download torrent file.
Required software:
WAIK 1.1 (download)
Mount the image and install WAIK before installing vLite
vLite (download)
At the first start, vLite will tell you how to enable the WAIK stuff installed before
vLite Settings file (download)
Extract the *.ini file and copy it to your vLite root directory/presets
Imaging Software: i.e. Acronis True Image Echo Server 9.5 (download)
Link to trial version which fits your needs, you may also download it from your favorite warez/torrent site if you need a full version
You can download Windows 7 Beta 1 either from the official Microsoft Windows 7 download site or via Torrent, which should be 100% legal since the official version has been released for public testing. Download torrent file.
I will test out whether I can get Aero running on this version, see if it’s more stable than the old release and stuff like that.
New functions/issues and changes to the previous version (Build 6956):
Graphics driver for “Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS” included, so full screen resolution (1024×600) now possible without driver installation
Keyboard function buttons (volume up, volume down, mute, …) still not working without installation of Asus ACPI
Even after installation of Asus ACPI drivers the buttons are not working… the volume up/down window shows up, but nothing happens, and a window pops up saying “Missing Audio Driver, disable Fn+F7,8,9. Please install Audio Driver” but the audio driver is installed.
Internet Explorer 8 has now a “InPrivate” mode like Google Chrome’s “Incognito Mode”
When trying to watch HD videos on Youtube with Internet Explorer 8/Flash Player 10 Windows completely freezes. Only restart helps
After this Youtube HD crash, the whole Windows 7 system is fucked. Automatic system restore took 10 minutes to fix it, then I could finally reboot. So HD videos can destroy your Windows installation? Interesting…
The Desktop Gadget Gallery is finally working! In Build 6956 nothing happened when you tried to access it.
Windows 7 doesn’t recognize the other SDD with Windows XP installed on it. The explorer just shows the Win7 SDD as C:\ and nothing else
When you click at the images in the task bar that replace the old image and text there, even tabs inside Internet Explorer are shown so you can go directly to the tab you want
Everything runs much faster and smoother than before. Now you can have multiple applications running in the same time without them crashing all the time.
Shutdown is still awful slow (takes around 3 minutes, that’s longer than starting up!)
Windows still crashes when trying to run the Windows Performance Assessment Tool (WinSAT), at “Running: Media Foundation Playback Assessment v1.0.0.0 ‘-input C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\winsat.wmv -nopmp”, thus you can’t get a rating for your computer and Aero won’t be able to run.
The built-in microphone is still not really working. It can hear something, but is soo silent, when you scream into it, the bar goes up only 0.5%. Something is wrong there.
When one tab in Internet Explorer 8 crashes, Windows 7 will terminate it, but all the other tabs are still working (like in Chrome). After a few seconds, the tab is restored. This feature is actually not that bad.
Reactivation from Stand-By is not working, the screen just stays black all the time.
This tutorial will show you how to install Microsoft Windows 7 on the Asus Eee PC 900. Except for the last part (configuring boot devices), this tutorial works for every other netbook out there! Just follow the instructions to create your bootable Windows 7 USB thumbdrive, plug it into your netbook and start!
If the image doesn’t satisfy you, see this video proof:
(In this video, I am running Build 6956, although the startup animation is not the correct one. I guess that the graphics card is not good enough to display the 3D animation. This way of installing Windows 7 will work with any version of Windows 7)
That so many games are running is due to the fact, that the Asus hardware isn’t as weak as it seems. Normal game requirements are optimized for a Intel Pentium 4 processor, but the Celeron is a lot more powerful, so even games requiring 1.2 GHz on a P4 can run on a 900 MHz Celeron.
