I stumbled upon a neat article this evening, one of those rare items that piques my interest to the point where I want to give it a try. 

There have been rumors for some time surrounding Google's ChromeOS, culminating in the news that a Google press release was forthcoming today. As it turns out, not only did we learn something about ChromeOS, we got the opportunity to download a VMWare image of it. Take note: you need to create a GDGT account in order to download this copy, but hey, it's worth it.

It took a while to download - mostly because the signup process with GDGT was having issues. There may have been rush at the GDGT servers, since I was attempting to download only an hour after the initial post.

My testing platform is simple - A Dell laptop with a Core2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, 64 bit Windows 7, 500gb hard drive. I also have VMWare Server 2.0.0 loaded, since I test a number of server platforms for clients. My virtual machines are simply placed in a folder off the root: c:\virtuals.

After downloading the .vmdk file, the first order of business was to extract it from its zip archive. This balloons the ~300MB file up to ~700mb. The .vmdk file was then moved to a "Chrome" subfolder under the "c:\virtuals" directory. This is where the (not too) technical stuff happens:

First, you will need to manage your VMWare environment. Open either the VMWare Infrastructure Client (VIC) or the VMWare Infrastructure Web Access client.

The following slideshow will take you through the basic steps. Enjoy! My impressions after the slideshow.

Google's gameplan is to basically code this around specific hardware, which will make the system incredibly fast. The demo unit used booted in 7 seconds. That's pretty fast.

I like where this is going, and would love to see everything that I want or need up "in the cloud". I'm not sure when/if we will get there, but this is a push in the right direction. I realize that there are many people that are not as comfortable with their information in someone else's hands... but let's face it, while it may not be as important to them as it is to you - they probably know how to take care of it better than you do.

I did have just a little trouble, because I have a Google Apps / Pro account. It was a bit clunky to get at my email and apps... but I eventually got there... But the apps dashboard did not work for me, primarily because it's expecting a google.com account, not a gmail.com account. So we'll have to wait to see what that looks like.

Annoyingly, my primary web based billing application, Quickbooks Online, does not work in Chrome, so I am prevented from using this for any kind of business use... Which is fine, because that does not seem to be the initial target for ChromeOS anyway. This looks to be aimed at more casual users, and will be an ideal solution for people that don't have a ton of cash to throw at a (mostly underutilized) laptop or desktop. A fantastic homework machine.

While it was neat to download it and play with it, it was a bit like a kid receiving a toy without the required batteries. Gratification will come, but we are waiting for the rest of the functionality to really see what this can do. In the meantime, there are plenty of reviews of it out there.