There was a pretty strange occurrence today regarding Google’s upcoming Chrome OS. Earlier in the morning I had reports saying Gizmodo made a post about Google Chrome OS being available today, all of a sudden out of the blue. Within a few minutes that post disappeared, however, the site that was linked to for the free download was within Google’s ‘Sites’ sub-domain, stating a beta of Chrome OS was available to be downloaded for testing. They also claimed it was a Linux distribution based off of a modified GNOME Desktop environment. I went ahead and went to the site and downloaded an ISO of what was claimed to be a beta via Bittorrent.
After the download I tried to install the ISO within an isolated VM Machine session, but after being prompted to boot it simply went to a black screen and was not functional, at least not for me. Upon visiting that download site again it now states that the site has been disabled due to a terms of service violation.
Could this be some sort of mistake on Google’s end, and could an early image have gone out far too early? Or was this an elaborate hoax made by someone out there on the internet wanting to stir up some trouble?
Link: http://sites.google.com/site/chromeoslinux/home
