If you have been curious about trying out Google’s Chrome OS (or Chromium OS – they seem to call it both) there is a VMWare image available for download at gdgt.com. You will need to set up an account there if you don’t already have one, but it is painless. The VM image is zipped to around 300MB so downloading is not painful at all.
If you are using VMWare Player or VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion (on Mac) there is nothing you need to do but open it up and go. If you are using Parallels, however, there are a couple steps to take.
First you need to convert the vmdk to a raw disk image. To do this you will need to get Qemu (actually, qemu-img, a utility that comes with Qemu.) If you are on a Mac (as most Parallels users are) you can download and install Q, which is a very nice OS X port of Qemu with a GUI (which we won’t be using for this exercise).
The command to convert the disk image is slightly different if you are using the default Qemu package or the one provided with Q. If you are using the default the following should work (assuming your install of Qemu is in /usr/bin/):
/usr/bin/qemu-img convert chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk -O raw chrome.hdd
If you are using Q, the version of qemu-img that is included does not quite handle the command line switches correctly. Luckily, it defaults to raw image output. The command if you have Q installed should look like:
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk chrome.hdd
Now, start up Parallels, and add a new VM. For type, set it to Other Linux and when it asks whether to create a new disk image or use an existing one tell it to use the disk image you just created.
Start the VM and enjoy(?) the browser as OS experience. Oh, and the login credentials? Your Google account.