Of all the big computer companies only Dell really supports desktop Linux and, in particular Dell offers a nice selection of PCs running Ubuntu Linux. What Dell hasn’t done though is come out and announce that they were working on Google’s beta Chrome OS. Other vendors, such as Acer, HP and Lenovo are on board with Chrome. Regardless of that, Dell is actually the first big-time vendor to have released a version of Chrome OS designed to work with one of their netbooks.

This isn’t an official beta though. No, this is a skunkworks project. In a Dell blog posting Dell technology strategist Doug Anson revealed that he and some of his work friends decided to try to get Chrome OS running on a Dell Mini 10v netbook. They were successful. Sort of.

You can see for yourself. Anson wrote, “I have released an USB key image file to: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto. The file name is: “ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img.” It contains a functioning image of my USB key loaded with ChromiumOS. In addition, I have made a best effort attempt to get the Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter working in this image. It’s definitely not perfect (read: highly experimental, untested, unstable, yada yada…) but it does appear to function.”

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