Chrome OS Development on a Mac

Question

Google just announced the open source release of their Chromium/Chrome OS product:

• Hello, open source developers. Would you like to help build an operating system for web users?

I'm working on a macbook running snow leopard, and I want to start hacking around with Google's Chrome OS. They suggest using Ubuntu 8.10 linux distro.

I'm curious if any developers have been able to build/use the Chrome OS source code on a Mac, and if not has anyone used a virtual machine or bootcamp on a mac into Ubuntu to develop Chrome OS.

I'm looking for the best possible VM OS solution that lets me stay as close to my Mac OS (I don't like the idea of partitioning and rebooting to hack around in a virtual OS). Are there any free VM solutions (VMWare Fusion costs). I could just use bootcamp into linux, but I'm looking for a solution that let's me stay inside Snow Leopard and possibly even share my disk space with the virtual OS?

Answer 1

you can use virtualbox, I don't think there any kind of problem to install an Ubuntu in virtualbox, for sharing the disk I think you would be able to give access to the network to the emulated OS so it shouldn't too difficult.

Answer 2

Just get VirtualBox from Virtualbox.org. I'm using it everyday on Linux host to run Windows. Works great!

Answer 3

There's also Q, which is very fast. You may also be interested in Chrome extensions which don't require a full install of Chrome OS.

Answer 4

Don't know about Chrome, as I have't tinkered with it yet but I'd highly recommend considering Fusion. Sure it's not free, but I've found it to be SO much nicer than VirtualBox as to make it worth it. VirtualBox doesn't seem to be as nice when it comes to host hardware passthrough, and things like that.

Answer 5

Virtualbox is the best "free" solution to running a Linux development environment for Google's Chrome OS.

Google also has XCode projects to build Chromium the multi-process browser, and TestShell (to test Webkit code).

Chromium Mac Build Instructions

This allows Mac devs to easily test most of the functionality offered with Chrome OS (minus the Linux kernel and system libraries).

Answer 6

Like the others, I'd recommend VirtualBox TechCrunch posted a guide about how to install Chrome with VirtualBox on a Mac earlier today

Answer 7

Virtualbox is the best free solution for running a Linux distro on a mac.

More simply they provide instructions for building and running Chromium on a mac (minus the Linux distro and system libraries):

• Mac Build Instructions - Build instructions for Chromium on Mac OS X