It didn't take long after Google released early test code of its Chrome OS for some enterprising techies to build it and make it available as a virtual machine.

A colleague managed to download a copy of this and I took a quick look using VMware Workstation to run it, but sadly, there isn't that much to report; if you have used Google's Chrome browser, then you have a fair idea of what it's like to use Chrome OS, as the browser pretty much IS the operating system.

Once Chrome OS is available, users will have access to web apps - primary Google's own apps like Google Docs and Picasa, but not necessarily restricted to these - but Chrome has no "desktop" as there is with most other operating systems, just browser tabs, and a few drop-down menu options for functions such as turning Wi-Fi on and off on your system (Chrome OS is intended for netbooks).

The build I looked at (very briefly) seemed very slow, but then I was running it with a limit of 256MB memory on a PC with 1GB total memory in the first place, and not everything seemed to be working. I hope to get a fuller hands-on with the software in future.

20 Nov 2009