This does wipe all existing data but with cheap SSDs it's not beyond the realms of possibility you could buy a dedicated drive.
It's not advertised within the OS but there's a command which easily copies the OS partitions to an internal hard drive. There are live disc versions too, but with writable media you're able to save your settings and carry the OS around with you. The easiest of them is to download an image, write it to a USB drive or SD card and boot this from your laptop or PC. You've got an array of options for trying Chromium OS. This doesn't appear to be maintained as of April 2013, but it will still work. We're using this Chrome OS build, which is kept current.Īnother popular build is over at the Hexxeh website. It's unlikely you'll want to build it yourself from source, so there are versions ready for VirtualBox and for running and installing off a USB drive. One thing we do know is that non-Intel wireless adaptors do cause issues, we'll go into this in more detail in a moment.Ī number of sites have maintained builds of Chromium OS. A general rule of thumb is: any standard Intel hardware should work without a hitch.
Having said that we tried it on a standard Lenovo X200 laptop from 2008 and everything worked without a hitch.
