The year of Linux is here. According to Google sold more Chromebooks in the first quarter of 2016 than Apple sold Macbooks. And, Chromebooks are about to get even more exciting. During the Google I/O Summit, the company announced that the Google Play store for Android is coming to Chromebooks in mid June, which will allow users to run Android apps on their Chrome OS devices. But, you don’t have to buy a brand new laptop to use Chrome OS; you can now easily convert your old laptop or PC into a powerful Chromebook. I did this for a Dell Mini and a Dell laptop that I bought in 2009. Those two devices were collecting dust and were destined for freecycling, because modern operating systems and desktop environments like Unity, Plasma, and Gnome won’t run on them. If you have an old system lying around, you can easily convert it into a Chromebook. You can also dual-boot your laptop with Chrome OS, so you get the best of both worlds. Thanks to the open source base of Chrome OS, many solutions out there enable you to install the operating system on your device. I tried looking around chromium os for some build but only found.bin and.img files, which. -to-run-chrome-os-from-a-usb-drive-and-use-it-on-any-computer/ I've. Thought since ChromeOs is based on Linux, they's have to conform. Based on Google's Chromium OS, the same open-source architecture as. Image below to your Downloads folder (not to the USB stick) and then follow our. I have tried several, but the solution I like most is CloudReady. The company offers a free, community-supported version of the OS along with a commercially supported version for $49 per year, per device. ![]() The good part is that all licenses are transferable, so if you sell or donate the device, you can also transfer the Neverware license to the new user. What You’ll Need Before you can get started installing CloudReady on your laptop, you will need some preparation: • A USB drive with 4GB or more storage • Open Chrome browser, go to Google Chrome Store and install. • Change BIOS settings of your target PC so it can boot from the USB Get Started Neverware offers two images for CloudReady: 32 bit and 64 bit. Download the appropriate OS for your hardware from the page. Extract the content of the downloaded zip file, and you will get a chromiumos_image.bin file. Now plug in the USB device and open the Chromebook recovery utility. Click on the gear at the top right corner of the tool and select erase recovery media (Figure 1). The entire process will take up to 20 minutes, depending on the storage media and the processing power. Once installed, the PC will shut down and reboot. After you reboot, you will be greeted with the network settings page (Figure 6). The exciting thing is that, although I had to install wireless drivers for Linux distributions on the same hardware, everything worked out of the box with Chromium OS. Once you connect to the wireless network, the system will look for updates and also offer to install Adobe Flash. Once the installation is finished, you will see the Chromium OS login screen. Now you can just log into your Gmail account and start using your “Chromebook” right away. Now you need the good old trick of using a user agent switcher (Figure 8). Go to Chrome Webstore and install. Once the plugin is installed, it will be added to the bookmark bar of the browser. Right-click on the agent switcher icon and create a new entry (Figure 9): Name: 'CloudReady Widevine' String: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/16.10 Chrome/49.0.1453.93' Group: 'Chrome' (should be filled automatically) Append: 'Replace' Indicator Flag: 'IE' Click 'Add'. Good article. I've been experimenting with cloudready on a variety of machines, and have been impressed by what Neverware has been able to do. I like being able to turn an old SFF desktop into a Chromebox to hook up to my TV, and you can set up a Chromebook with far better specs than most of the official Chromebooks out there. But if you want to give cloudready a try, please keep in mind this is not Chrome, and it is not supported by Google. The developers at Neverware have done a remarkable job packaging Chromium to work on so many different machines, but there are Chrome features that are missing, and there are features that don't work. The free version of cloudready is essentially the beta test for their paid version, so sometimes things break. Don't expect to set up a cloudready machine for a non-tech savvy person and expect it to 'just work', they will probably need help from time to time to fix things. There are bugs sometimes that require shell commands to workaround until the next patch is released.
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