How to Install Chrome OS On A USB Stick (Windows,Linux and Mac)

ChromeOS Cherry released with new Broadcom/Ralink support and many bugfixes! Broadcom WiFi works, but you need to wait about 5 minutes after booting to connect to a network.

First you need to Download Diet Chromium from here

Windows Instructions for installing Chromium OS to USB

Download Image Writer for Windows from here and extract the program. Launch the program, and select the image (ChromeOS-Cherry.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.

Ubuntu Instructions for installing Chromium OS to USB

First you need to install USB Image Writer using the following command

sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter

After installing it, you will find it under Applications > Accessories > Image Writer.

Then simply select the chomiumos.img under “Write image”, select your USB drive, and click on the “Write on device” button

For Other Linux Users follow this procedure

Linux Instructions for installing Chromium OS to USB.

Extract ChromeOS-Cherry.img and run the following command in the same directory as the file, where X is the device name of your USB drive.

sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4M

Once the command finishes, you can then boot from the USB drive.

For Mac Users Follow this procedure

Firstly, unmount the drive you want to install Chromium OS to. Place the downloaded file onto your desktop. Open System Profiler, click USB on the list at the side and then select the entry that represents your USB disk. Now look for the BSD Name column (http://bit.ly/5mG4WK). Remember what is written here. In my case, it is disk1, but in yours it may be different. Take care here as if you get it wrong, it could seriously mess things up. Once you have this, open up Terminal and type the following commands.

cd Desktop
tar -zxvf ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz

For the next command, replace X with the name of the disk you found earlier, ie disk1.

sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4m

This command will ask you to enter your password (the same one you enter when installing software for example), type it in and press enter. This command will take a while to run, about 20 minutes for me, and then will give you your shell prompt back once it has finished. Once it has, you can remove your USB drive and boot from it.

Troubleshooting

Q: It says “Resource Busy”! What’s up?

A: You forgot to dismount the drive. Do this, then retype the command and you should be fine.

Q: What are the default username/passwords for this build?

A: Default username is facepunch, default password is facepunch.

Q: I’m getting the following error, what’s up? “The server’s security certificate is revoked!”

A: This is a known bug with Chrome, and a way to fix it is simply to make sure the timezone setting in ChromeOS/Chrome is set to your correct timezone to match the system clock.