Hey, you. Yeah, you with the netbook. Have you been wanting to try something new on it? Yes? You have? Well your going to find this tutorial very useful then.
Well you may have heard Google announced an OS called Chromium. It is basically a web browser with some extra features. Mainly aimed at netbooks and smaller computing devices. Now, I know you want to try it so here are the instructions:
1. Download the Chromium image from Hexxeh’s site.
2. Extract the image to a directory of your choice.
3. Now follow one of these steps:
If you’re on Windows:
Download Image Writer for Windows (http://bit.ly/7gRu0n) and extract the program. Launch the program, and select the image (ChromeOS-Cherry.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.
If you are on Linux:
Extract ChromeOS-Cherry.img and run the following command in the same directory as the file, where X is the device name of your USB drive.
sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4M
Once the command finishes, you can then boot from the USB drive.
Lastly but not least, if you are on a Mac:
Firstly, unmount the drive you want to install Chromium OS to. Place the downloaded file onto your desktop. Open System Profiler, click USB on the list at the side and then select the entry that represents your USB disk. Now look for the BSD Name column (http://bit.ly/5mG4WK). Remember what is written here. In my case, it is disk1, but in yours it may be different. Take care here as if you get it wrong, it could seriously mess things up. Once you have this, open up Terminal and type the following commands.
cd Desktop
tar -zxvf ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gzFor the next command, replace X with the name of the disk you found earlier, ie disk1.
sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4m
This command will ask you to enter your password (the same one you enter when installing software for example), type it in and press enter. This command will take a while to run, about 20 minutes for me, and then will give you your shell prompt back once it has finished. Once it has, you can remove your USB drive and boot from it
And a little info, you can’t actually boot into it on a Mac, it wont work.
Now, if you’ve done the steps properly you can now boot from your USB and try out Chromium OS.
If it didn’t work check out this FAQ and if you still can’t solve your problem PM me or post a comment.
Enjoy!
All credit goes to @Hexxeh for making this build possible. I was just a tester.








#1 by Jawcl on December 5th, 2009
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Sweet, one day I’ll have a Netbook although I have my iPod Touch so I might not need it :/
#2 by Ryan on December 7th, 2009
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i want the Asus tablet netbook, might get it before the summer
#3 by RBSIS on December 7th, 2009
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I would recommend the HP Mini 311. It has the Nvidia Ion chipset.
#4 by Supernova on December 10th, 2009
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I get a not enough space on disk error.
#5 by RBSIS on December 10th, 2009
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When you are writing to the USB? Or when you are booting from it?
#6 by Supernova on December 11th, 2009
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When writing
#7 by RBSIS on December 12th, 2009
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Are you using a 1GB flash drive?
#8 by nikudyshko on December 25th, 2009
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I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
#9 by RBSIS on December 25th, 2009
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Sure, you’re free to quote it. I’d like it if you posted a link back to the original blog post though. And thank you for asking.
And my Twitter account is “RBSIS_” if that’s what you’re asking.
#10 by Kyle Thompson (GameBox 47) on January 6th, 2010
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Windows 7 is mah fancy here.