For Google fans, trick-or-treat came a bit early. On Wednesday, a brief rash of Twitter posts suggested that the search behemoth had released a preview version of its forthcoming Chrome OS. An official-looking page offered the opportunity to download the public beta as a VMWare appliance—but it turns out that the download was a fake. The site, hosted on Google’s Web-hosting service, has since been shut down.
The news of the release seemed believable given Google’s announcement this week of the new Android 2.0 operating system, primarily intended for mobile devices. And the fall has so far been filled with big OS launches—Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard in August and Microsoft’s Windows 7 last week.
Back in July, Google said that it aimed to ship Chrome OS in the second half of 2010, but preview versions of the operating system were widely expected to become available later this year. So it seemed plausible, until you started digging and saw that despite Google’s claims of grandeur, the download appeared to be little more than a hacked-together Linux distribution. This isn't the first instance, either: in September, screenshots surfaced purporting to be pictures of Chrome OS; a prankster later took credit for creating them.
More: http://www.macworld.com/article/143552/
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The news of the release seemed believable given Google’s announcement this week of the new Android 2.0 operating system, primarily intended for mobile devices. And the fall has so far been filled with big OS launches—Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard in August and Microsoft’s Windows 7 last week.
Back in July, Google said that it aimed to ship Chrome OS in the second half of 2010, but preview versions of the operating system were widely expected to become available later this year. So it seemed plausible, until you started digging and saw that despite Google’s claims of grandeur, the download appeared to be little more than a hacked-together Linux distribution. This isn't the first instance, either: in September, screenshots surfaced purporting to be pictures of Chrome OS; a prankster later took credit for creating them.
More: http://www.macworld.com/article/143552/
