Now that the Chromebook is out and I’ve speculated about the target audience, I wanted to give running the Google OS a shot. The closest I know that you can get is running Chronium OS which is the open source version.
The VM
This is the first time I needed a virtual machine on my mac. I decided to start with VirtualBox since it is free for personal use. It met my needs, so I’m done. I should try Fusion at some point, but I didn’t need it for this. I started by downloading the 82MB download for VirtualBox.
Setting up the VM
Since the “versioned” copy only provides a VM Ware and USB stick image, I tried following the instructions to convert the USB image to a vgi virtualbox file. (The USB download is 324 MB.) Launching the VM that way just gave me a black screen.
Next I tried getting the nightly snapshot build for VirtualBox from the “vanilla” site. That worked well and I got the Chromium login screen.
I created the VM both times. using 512 MB RAM and Linux Ubuntu 32 bit.
Taking a screenshot
The only thing that that wasn’t obvious in VirtualBox was how to take a screenshot. Thanks to this Techmix post, I learned you need to press left command to return the keyboard to the host mac and then use the right command key (with shift + 4) to grab a screenshot and have it sent to the desktop of the host mac. And you have to do this every time because the keyboard focus returns to the VM every time you command+tab back to it.
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I had cause to do this again. I learned if the RAM is too low on the VM, you just get a black screen. Switching to 512 solved this.
Also forgot guest settings to use shared internet: NAT/adapter type intel pro mt desktop. And right command to get back mouse. The things you forget when not using it for a few months!