Easy to install in a virtual machine.
Google's upcoming operating system for the first series of mini-notebook, Chrome OS, can already be tested on the regular PCs. It assumes however that you have installed a virtualization solution with support for the VMware virtual disk format, VMDK. This includes many of VMware's own products, but also Sun's VirtualBox, which is freely available for all major operating systems.
What one must do to get started with Chrome OS in this way is to download a VMDK file with Chrome OS that has been set together by Dave Schumaker, community manager for this GDGT. The file is available on this page, but it requires that one registers as a GDGT user before you can download the file, which is ZIP-packed and is about just over 300 megabytes.
The file is put into use by creating a new virtual machine in the virtualization solution to use and then select VMDK file when you come to the dialogue about creating virtual hard disks.
On this page, Schumaker said that in the network settings you must select the "bridged" mode and not "NAT". 
We logs normally into the Chrome OS with the same username and password on Gmail and other Google services. But when I tried with VirtualBox, I was notified that the web access was not established.
Having dug a little, I found that the change to NAT mode, however, as well as to login with the username "Chronos" and blank password, I came into the new operating system. There I could enter our regular login information and was able to access the browser-based application environment.
On a laptop with a relatively weak, dual-core processor processor without hardware support for virtualization, it took about 12 seconds to get to the login window. Then, it took 6.7 seconds before the user interface was ready to use.
The Chrome OS userinterface is mainly composed as the Browser Chrome.
