I am going to try something new. I have some Buckethead music glaring, a whole season of My Name is Earl just came in on DVD, and I have some spare cycles to burn. What does that mean for you? It means I am going to go through these instructions and try to install Chrome OS and give it a look see.
I have decided to do this as a quasi-live blog and give all of the appropriate comments and growing pains inline as I discover them. Enjoy!
Getting Started
4:00PM, Thursday, November 19th
My test platform is my trusty 17” Unibody Macbook Pro. It’s got a 2.8Ghz Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hard drive, Snow Leopard OS, and most importantly for this exercise, VMware Fusion 3.0.
The first part of the adventure is getting a platform to install it on. If you read my blog you are aware that I am a Fedora man when it comes to Linux. Unfortunately for me, Google seems to have a thing for Ubuntu, so I am downloading Ubuntu 9.10 from Ubuntu.com as my build platform. I’ll be installing it into a Virtual Machine on the Mac. (Unless there is something I don’t know about, I should be able to host the VM and share it when I am done, I’ll check on that.)
4:16PM, Thursday, November 19th
Ubuntu may be slow downloading (70%), but Buckethead is wailing. If you like guitar music and haven’t heard him, check out the album Giant Robot, right now the song “Want some Slaw?” This guy is too good, a shame he’s absolutely nuts. 
Oh, and even though we are talking about Google and Apple so far, you should get ZunePass from Microsoft and get your own Buckethead fix going!
4:26PM, Thursday, November 19th
Ubuntu is downloaded, I started the new Virtual Machine wizard, increased the default RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB, and started the install.
4:35PM, Thursday, November 19th
Ok, Ubuntu is installed. Let’s check all the prerequisites and make sure we can build this sucker. On a related note, that’s only 9 minutes to install. Considering that it’s a completely functional OS with productivity software, communication software and all the basic tools you need to function on the internet, that’s not too shabby. Once it reboots we’ll set a root password and update everything.
The list is pretty long, lucky for us they have a simple apt command that has all of them in one batch, run:
$ sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ g++-multilib \ bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libasound2-dev \ libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libgconf2-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev
That’s a lot of junk getting installed at once, but it only took about 5 minutes to complete.
Let’s Get Some Source Code!
4:49PM, Thursday, November 19th
Ok, Ubuntu is happy, now we need to download some code. I am choosing not to go the git route as I have no intention to change or check in code. I am downloading the tarball of the code and it clocks in at 232MB.
Started the compile, let’s see how long this thing takes to build.
5:31PM, Thursday, November 19th
Still building. It’s been going for almost an hour. I still have more building to do when this script finishes. Woohah..
5:46PM, Thursday, November 19th
Build finished, can’t seem to get the system to enter chroot so I can start the next part of the build process. Taking a break for some TERYAKI!!!
8:30PM, Thursday, November 19th
Well, I am chroot blocked. I can’t get this sucker to finish building. I am calling it a night on this front, but I’ll give it another shot tomorrow. Please leave suggestions in the comments if you have seen this symptom:
When I run the enter_chroot.sh script, it says it mounted chroot, then immediately unmounted chroot. Thoughts?
Stay tuned for more adventures installing Google Chrome OS
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See here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1332005
I got into the chroot, but it doesn’t seem to have a compiler and hits an error once I cd into /home/root/trunk/src/scripts and run ./build_platform_packages.sh.
Try running ./make_chroot.sh one more time. I had the same problem and it worked for me.
I encountered the same problem initially because I forgot to run ./make_chroot.sh before ./enter_chroot.sh.
If you’re still having issues, run this to make it enter chroot successfully:
./make_chroot.sh –mirror=http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/packages –suite=chromeos_dev
I stop at the same place
./enter_chroot.sh
searching for answer and end up here
I’m building Chrome on Ubuntu 9.04 and have run into the same problem. I posted on Ubuntuforums.org and apparently the solution is to create an empty folder that the script is expecting.
tnx spencer8ab, I manage to start chroot. but now first we must
cd /home/root/trunk/src/scripts/
and then ./build_platform_packages.sh
But one again I get errors, missing gcc cc and so on… what to do next??
All this to install an OS that’s even more limited than the Ubuntu build that it is being based on top of? Why doesn’t google slap their logo on a copy of X/ED/K/Ubuntu and be done with it? DL the distro, burn the ISO to disk, install to hard drive and enjoy, or not enjoy as the case may be. Heck.. maybe they could even make it use WUBI too.
I also had this encountered the same problem initially because I forgot to run ./make_chroot.sh
I have installed Chrome OS on one of my netbooks and the performance of Chrome OS is just okay. there is nothing fancy or very special about it. It was just a sort of GUI version of linux or something.
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i installed Chrome OS on two of my netbooks. the Chrome OS works great and its loading time is very fast too.