Rumors regarding a possible operating system by Google have been floating around the Internet since... well, pretty much forever (or at least a couple of years), the whole world expecting the search engine giant to tackle this field as well, especially after releasing the Android operating system for mobiles. These speculations became even more intense this year, when Google acknowledged the fact that it was actually working on an OS designed mostly for the netbook and ultra-portable segment and built around its own browser, the Chrome OS.

In any case, things became a lot clearer yesterday, when Google unveiled a few more details regarding the development stage of the Chrome OS, as well as what we should expect from it from the point of view of the user experience. And to sum things up, we'll talking about “cloud all the way,” since the operating system from Google will rely heavily on the company's numerous online applications, practically turning the computer it's installed on into a cloud client.

Besides announcing the new OS, Google has also released a good chunk of the uncompiled open source code for the Chromium project (a.k.a. Chrome OS), which has already been grabbed, compiled and posted online in several places (including here some of the world's most notorious torrent trackers). However, as expected, you won't be able to run this thing natively, since it's only available as a VMware image (.vmdk) file, which requires a virtual machine setup in order to work (we chose Sun's VirtualBox software, since this is the one we're most familiar with).

So, what we'll do next is a mix between an install guide and some personal comments regarding the overall Chrome OS experience and what we should expect when its more elaborate versions actually become available.

Install steps:

Step 1: Download VirtualBox (available right here on Softpedia).

Step 2: Download the Chrome OS .vmdk file (you'll easily find a download source within the first five search results on Google) and unrar/unzip it, as required. If you're using Linux, you can also download it from Softpedia.

Step 3: Install VirtualBox and start it.

Step 4: Create a new Virtual Machine (choosing Ubuntu Linux as an OS type).

Step 5: When selecting the Virtual Hard Disk, select the “Use existing Hard Disk” option and then click the “browse” button, while leaving the <no media> option in place.

Step 6: In the virtual media manager menu, click “Add” from the top menu and select the .vmdk file containing the Chrome OS image.

Step 7: Click finish and then start the resulted virtual machine.

After you're done with these steps and the virtual “Chromium OS” starts, you'll be faced with a login menu, where you'll have to input your Gmail account and password. Given the more or less unreliable source of the .vmdk file, we thought it would be safer to create a new Gmail account just for testing purposes (this is pretty much what we did).

After logging in with the specially created account, users will be presented with the very familiar interface of the Chrome browser by Google, which has undergone only a few minor changes. In fact, since this is, without a doubt, a very early pre-release, it lacks most of the cool new features officially presented by Google upon announcing the Chrome OS, but there are a few details pointing out that this is actually more than a simple browser.

Hence, as you can see from the photos, on the left side of the browser, above the tools controlling the various settings, we've got several drop-down menus providing some extra-functionalities, clearly related to the first target machines of this new operating system, namely netbooks. So, by clicking on the respective buttons, users are allowed to connect/disconnect the Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking options, at the same time providing relevant information regarding the built-in battery's charge status.

Another interesting thing worth mentioning is that, while browsing through the menus, we've come across a nifty little feature that allows users to adjust the “Touch Sensitivity” and “Speed Sensitivity,” which is a more or less clear indication that support for touch-enabled portable computing systems will also be provided.

Apart from this, there's really not much to be said about this very early release of the operating system. In fact, if you want to further test what it will be able to provide, just use the Chrome browser with a couple of Google's online tools, such as Calendar, Picassa, YouTube, etc., and you'll get pretty much the same feeling... at least for now, because some serious updates are quite likely to be carried out in the future.