Alex James Brown » vmware

Running Chrome OS in VMWare Workstation – Step By Step

Alex — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:45:13 +0000

I wanted to have a play with Chrome OS, but didn’t fancy compiling the code etc…

Fortunately, GdGt provide a VMDK that you can download, and be up and running in no time using VMWare workstation (or player for that matter)

Step 1 – Download Chrome OS VMDK

I downloaded a Chrome OS VMDK from GdGt – you can get it here:
http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/

Step 2 – Create a new VMWare machine

Select “I will install the operating system later”

As the guest operating system, select Linux, then Ubuntu
Others may work, but this is the one that worked for me.

You can choose whatever size to make the disk, since you will be replacing this anyway!

Click finish.

Step 3 – Edit the newly created machines settings

One the machine is created, click Edit virtual machine settings (before you power it on)

Select the Hard Disk, and click Remove

Then, press Add.

Select Hard Disk, and press next.

Select “Use an existing virtual disk”

Note:

At this stage, it would be sensible to unzip the downloaded file from gdgt to your ChromeOS VM Directory (in my case C:\VM\Chrome OS (if you haven’t done so already)

Then, click next in the above screen

Select the chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk file, and click Finish.

If it asks you to convert the existing virtual disk to a newer format, just select “Keep Existing Format” and press Ok.

The new hard drive will be added.

Click Ok.

Step 4 – Power on the virtual machine

Power on the Virtual Machine, and after a few seconds, the login screen appears:

Enter your Google account username and password, and press enter
(note: you must be connected to the internet for this to work)

Ta Da!

Windows XP Virtual Machine – no network adapter / missing driver?

Alex — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:28:03 +0000

After creating a new Windows XP Virtual Machine, on VMWare Server, I noticed it had no network adapter.
It was an “unknown device” in Device Manager!

I installed VMWare tools, to no avail.

After painstaikingly thrashing about with my settings in VMWare Server, I took a look at my vmx file (located in the same directory as my virtual hard disks etc…)

It appears I had set the guest OS as Windows XP x64, when in actual fact, I had installed x32 version.

I changed this in my vmx file, and after reading this forum thread, deleted the following line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″

Voila! It worked!