The Chrome OS laptop Pilot Program has seen its time come and go. There are a lot of people interested in what Chrome OS can do that were not the recipients of the device, and anyone outside of the United States was pretty much left out. But there are alternatives available, such as Hexxeh’s Chrome OS Flow and Vanilla builds.
Chrome OS Flow is actually an older, yet user-friendly version that works on most hardware. Vanilla comes from daily Chromium OS builds and doesn’t work with a wide array of devices. But Hexxeh is close to release daily VM builds of Chrome OS Vanilla, as evidenced by this screenshot that shows Chromium OS R12 running in VirtualBox.
So for anyone looking to check out new Chrome OS builds without a Cr-48, this may be your best option. Hexxeh’s even trying to coax Parallels to support Vanilla’s new VM builds.
Parallels has been supporting Chrome OS since last year, when they showed off an iPad running the operating system via Parallels 6.
However, the current Chrome OS build in Parallels is very old – likely because they shipped the product with a build that worked long ago and then called it good. These VM builds will be able to auto-update, so you’ll be able to download a VM image once and then see the OS get regular changes in features as well as fixes.
Stay tuned on this one as we’re hearing this option will be available “soon”.
