
I recommend going with the vanilla builds. Vanilla is a nightly build almost straight from Google, but as a nightly build, stability can vary quite a bit from build to build, and with almost one a day out there, you have a lot to choose from. Flow is Hexxeh's custom build with automatic updating and more hardware support, but it hasn't been updated in over a year, and has some pretty annoying SSL issues that make accessing things like Gmail a pain. You basically have two choices: Flow and Vanilla. Hexxeh's builds are by far the most popular, but they all have their quirks. Unfortunately, the big downside of turning your netbook into an "unofficial" Chromebook is that you only have "unofficial" Chrome OS builds to work with. Preparation: Download Your Chromium OS Image You may need to use Unetbootin to put it on a flash drive if your netbook doesn't have a CD drive. If you don't have one, just grab an Ubuntu live CD it should work fine. You'll only need this if you want to dual boot your netbook with Chromium OS, so you can partition your drives and install a bootloader (since Chromium OS does not have an actual installer built in that does these things).

You can either grab a direct download or a torrent from the home page. This is the image we'll burn to our USB drive. If your computer doesn't support booting from a flash drive, you can boot from the Plop Boot Manager Live CD and then boot to the USB stick from there. Sadly, you can't burn Chromium OS to a CD the only way to test it out natively or install it is to use a USB thumb drive. (For example, it definitely does not work on Macs in my experience.) Here's a list of netbooks on which Chromium OS has been tested, and which ones work well (or have worked well at one point in time). It's worth trying on your machine anyway (after all, hardware compatibility is constantly improving, and you can test it on a live USB drive before committing), but just know that it might not work amazingly well. On some machines, it runs very slow, and may have other issues with things like the trackpad, webcam, or Wi-Fi.

Chromium OS, sadly, doesn't run well on every machine out there.
