I get asked fairly often questions pertaining to Chrome OS. Actually this may surprise you, but I enjoy talking about it. I know for many this whole Chrome OS thing is a bit confusing. So let me take this post to make clear what is going on. One of the big issues I hear about is the difference between Chrome OS and Chrome OS Flow. For those who have not been paying attention here is the real lowdown.

Google is planning on releasing an official Chrome operating system towards the end of 2010. This will be a portable computerof some sort, like a tablet or netbook that is branded as a Google product that comes loaded with Chrome OS. For the time being, all we have is what is known as Google’s open source Chromium OS project. You can visit the official site here, it has documentation and videos discussing ideas and possible specs for both the hardware and software.

Chrome OS Flow was developed by a UK student named Hexxeh. He took the open source Chromium OS code found on the Chromium project resources site and created his own packaged “build” to work with most netbook hardware that you can put on a USB stick or load as a VM image. Flow is a good representation of what the commerical Chrome OS will be like, and that is why there is some talk about it. If you’re interested in trying it out, I suggest you head over to his site.

There are others who have created their own builds, most notably a 64-bit version and one that has been created by the Dell Linux team. But so far Flow appears to be the best representation of what to expect later on this year.

Any other questions? Comment or contact me.

Ok, so I’m not a Mac user. But I know there are some of you out there reading that are. So when I get asked how to create a USB image for Mac I’m at a loss of words. Fortunately there are directions, and even better, there is a video for those non-Mac users like me who look at the written instructions and have no idea what is going on. So here you go, I hope this helps out the Apple users:

So, how does Flow run on a Mac? I’m curious.

UPDATE: Hexxeh, the creator of Flow, has said that it probably will not work on Macs, anyone out there get this running?

The image master extrordinaire Hexxeh has release a new version of his Diet Chrome build, called Chrome OS Cherry. According to his site, the new version is updated with bug fixes as well as wireless support for Broadcom and Ralink devices. We’ve heard that Hexxeh’s builds are solid, and that wireless support is running smooth on this version.

What’s so great about this version of Chrome OS? Well, it’s USB loaded, which means you can boot your PC from a USB drive, and then you shut down Chrome whenever you want to return back to your normal OS. You’ll need to be able to change you boot settings to load the USB in your BIOS, however.

You can get the build as a torrent here. You’ll need to extract the image and use a program to write the image to a USB device. Note that writing to the USB drive will erase anything that was stored there. Once, you get past that, start up your PC with the USB drive. The username and password to get into the operating system is facepunch/facepunch.

Enjoy!