virtualbox.org

Am trying to decide whether to move to a Chromebook as my front-end computer (while leaving my 7-year-old Macbook to do any actual computing things behind the scenes). I had been considering a Macbook Air, which I'd love, but since I use web-stuff and word-processing more than anything else, a Chromebook would be an optimised thin client while costing so much less I could afford to replace it if anything went wrong.

So I've been struggling with getting Chrome OS to work on virtualbox. I get virtualbox to run fine, and went to get the only .vdi file I could find for Chrome OS (by Hexxeh). After some head-scratching, I discovered that EFI is what Macs have instead of a BIOS, so I had to tick that to get it to find the kernel.

So far, it starts, counts the memory (512Mb) and ends up at a command-line shell full of some kind of block addresses (?) (BLK9 to BLK13, then BLK3 and BLK4, followed by complicated text along the lines of 0x0pci or something). This doesn't seem to want to do much when the user prods it, nor does it come up with bash or anything vaguely comprehensible (most unixy commands get 'not recognised'...).

'Help' comes up with a screen of complicated commands which scroll off the top of the screen and won't pipe to more, less or a file. When I read them out to my more techy friend, he said that nearly all of them were related to EFI or UEFI, so it sounds as if I've got to a particular part of the boot process and it's expecting me to add in extra parameters, which in my case I have not got.

Every other piece of troubleshooting I've found on Google involves people who get as far as the GUI before Chrome hangs at a login screen. Mine doesn't appear precisely to be *hanging* (and allows me to type stuff in), but it's not coming up with anything useful. Help?

Chrome OS is not a supported guest and given the issues with missing headers or not being to update the headers when the kernel changes I doubt it ever will be.

One can't even run Chrome OS in VirtualBox if you install Linux on a Chromebook because of the header issues Perry noted. For $199 you'd be better off just buying one.

Oh dear!

I was misled by reading how-tos from people for whom it actually works, evidently (apparently Chrome OS is a stripped-down Debian. Possibly *too* stripped-down to work on VB on my Mac!). I'd love to try it out as £229 is a significant amount of money for me, but I may instead have to put as much as possible of my Everything in the Googleverse and see if I can get used to it, which may be a good idea anyway because Apple's cloud services have stopped working for me since they called it iCloud (the one they had before that worked).

Thanks for the heads-up, will stop bashing my head against fruitless attempts now!

Woofb wrote: Oh dear!

I was misled by reading how-tos from people for whom it actually works, evidently (apparently Chrome OS is a stripped-down Debian. Possibly *too* stripped-down to work on VB on my Mac!). I'd love to try it out as £229 is a significant amount of money for me, but I may instead have to put as much as possible of my Everything in the Googleverse and see if I can get used to it, which may be a good idea anyway because Apple's cloud services have stopped working for me since they called it iCloud (the one they had before that worked).

Thanks for the heads-up, will stop bashing my head against fruitless attempts now!

I haven't tried it in awhile but I did try Chromium OS in VirtualBox a couple years ago. It actually will run but you can't install guest additions. I'm not sure why EFI enters into the picture at all since you only would need it to boot a Mac, not run a VM. I don't use anyone's cloud to store anything because of the reliability issues although Dropbox worked ok. I would try it without EFI checked but as I said, no guest additions which means you would be working with a very small screen. I own a Chromebook and that screen is too small

I managed to get ChromeOS running in VirtualBox. You can't use guest additions so the mouse is a bit slow along with the overall response with no hardware acceleration. But it can be done. No EFI checked btw.

I did get it done in the end. No EFI checked.

The actual "Unable to load kernel" message contained something about a 'pae', which I'd never heard of. My friend the Linux fan explained this should be on a processor tab somewhere, and eventually I found and ticked it.

Now I get a reasonable (though very slow) Chrome OS that lets me boot, load the GUI and do things.

Woofb wrote:I did get it done in the end. No EFI checked.

The actual "Unable to load kernel" message contained something about a 'pae', which I'd never heard of. My friend the Linux fan explained this should be on a processor tab somewhere, and eventually I found and ticked it.

Now I get a reasonable (though very slow) Chrome OS that lets me boot, load the GUI and do things.

Glad you got it working. I would have to say it's not a very good way of evaluating the Chromebook experience however.