Dell provides free Google Chrome OS download for Mini 10v netbook

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Dell has done a good deed for owners of its Mini 10v netbook by offering a custom build of Google’s Chrome OS for easy (ish) installation. It’s the work of Dell employee ‘Doug A’ who posted on a Dell blog that he thought he’d try compiling a copy of the open source OS for himself after seeing versions running on other netbooks last week.

The result is a Google Chrome OS image file that you can copy onto a USB flash drive and use to book a Dell Mini 10v without affecting the installed operating system. You’ll need an 8Gb flash drive (it’s a 7.5Gb download) and access to a computer running Linux to turn the downloaded IMG file into a bootable image, as Doug explains:

To copy onto an USB key (8GB minimum), find another Linux machine and utilize the "dd" command to put the image onto the USB key. Example:

dd if=ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img of=/dev/sdb

In this example, /dev/sdb is my entire USB key... use "fdisk -l" to see how your USB key is named for your particular environment. Be careful to select your USB device (again, use fdisk -l to double verify and confirm the correct device filename) and not another device...

Google Chrome OS doesn’t do anything that its Chrome web browser can’t provide at the moment, so we’re not sure that setting up a bootable USB flash drive is worth the palaver — particularly since the operating system is currently useless without internet access. Still, kudos to Dell for making the effort so early in Chrome OS’ life cycle.

The Google Chrome OS bootable image for the Dell Mini 10v is called ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img and here’s the download location.

[Direct2Dell]