Chrome beta released for Linux

If you've been using Linux, but wanted to use the Google branded Chrome browser, you've been out of luck.

Let me explain. The Chromium builds have been available for a long time, but not the Google Branded version you know as Chrome.

Well, I got an email this morning letting me know that it's available for beta testing!

Of course, .deb and .rpm files are available, which means that people like me (Archers) won't be able to have the Google branded version (at least not now).

Oh well, the chromium builds are more bleeding edge anyway, something that I pride myself in being as an Archer.

If anyone gives it a shot let me know.

Chrome OS source code available!

Wow! I can't believe this hasn't got bigger news! As of this writing, the source code has been available for 8 days and I've only seen this one site announcing it. Not only that, but it only has 1 Digg! Really?

This is incredible. As soon as I finish this blog post I'm going to download it and compile it! Maybe I'll set up a binary file for all my (who am I kidding?) readers.

Definitely would recommend you check out the source link if you want to compile it yourself.

EDIT:

So I got lazy and downloaded an IMG from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

Here's a quick tutorial on how to set it up in Virtual Box in Linux.

Download the file from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ (I chose to do the torrent way and was getting around 1 megabyte a second down)

Make a new directory for your extracted file. I called my chrome-os but you can call it whatever.

mkdir ~/chrome-os

Now, when I download things, I have them sent to my ~/downloads directory. Your directory might be different. (In Ubuntu, the directory is ~/Downloads note the capital "D")

We need to move the ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz to the new directory we created.

mv ~/downloads/ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz ~/chrome-os

Now we move into the directory.

cd ~/chrome-os

And unpack it...

tar -xvvzf ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz

That will create "ChromeOS-Cherry.img"

Here you have to options. We could just turn the .IMG into a VirtualBox harddrive, or we could burn it to a USB. I'll go over the former first.

To turn the .IMG directly into a VirtualBox harddrive we run

VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI ChromeOS-Cherry.img chrome-os.vdi

Awesome!

Now we just need to make a new instance in VirtualBox and attach the hard drive!

The second way is to burn it to a USB.

WARNING: THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR USB.

sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4M

Where "X" is your usb drive (typically sdb or sdc depending on your setup)