If you're aching to try out Chrome OS after taking a glimpse earlier today, friendly power user Mark Renouf has compiled a VMware image of Chrome OS for testing out in your virtual machine environment.

While Chrome OS is far from ready for the regular user, lots of us are aching to play around a little with Google's young operating system. This virtual machine-friendly build looks like a good way to do just that, and you can grab it via BitTorrent now. From The Pirate Bay page:

This is a ChromeOS image converted to VMware .vmdk file.

It was built from instructions provided on the ChromiumOS developers site:

http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions

Built from sources retreived on 11/19/2009, following the announcement of the opening of the ChromeOS source code.

Shared user password (for sudo, etc is 'chromeos')

If you give it a download and try it out, let's hear how it worked for you (and share any images you manage to grab) in the comments.

Update: Alternately, you can download a VMware build directly from web site gdgt as well, "no strings attached" (as long as you don't consider creating an account at gdgt and giving them your email address "strings").

ChromeOS [The Pirate Bay via ironicsans]

Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.

Earlier this week we broke the story about Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5. Today Google announced the deal on the Google Voice blog.

They aren’t saying much other than that the Gizmo5 team will join the Google Voice team, and that new Gizmo5 signups will be disabled.

One thing this gives Google – a much needed soft phone on the desktop for users to make calls through Google Voice. And integration with Google Talk is likely as well, which will let users of that service access the normal telephone system for inbound and outbound calls.

All in all this pits Google Voice nicely against Skype, which was also looking to buy the company. From the blog post:

Today we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired Gizmo5, a company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. While we don’t have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5’s engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number.

We’ve acquired a number of small companies over the past five years, and the people and technology that have come to Google from other places have contributed in many ways, large and small, to all kinds of Google products. Since the GrandCentral team joined Google in 2007, they’ve done incredible things with Google’s technology and resources to launch and improve Google Voice.

We welcome the Gizmo5 team to Google and look forward to working together to bringing more useful features to Google Voice.

CrunchBase Information

Gizmo5

Google

Skype

Google Voice

Google Talk

Information provided by CrunchBase