Tried it.

The good news is that yes, it worked.

The bad news is that they stated that it was a VMWare image. It isn’t. It is a VMWare disk image. You need the full version of VMWare in order to use this, or you need to use Sun’s free VM, VirtualBox.

It’s not a big deal, and this is slashdot so it is not like they have fact checkers in place.

So what about it? Well, it worked. Barely. It is a weird experience, even in a VM it still booted up in less than 10 seconds, which was impressive as hell. The thing boots up into a login window, and then it is just Chrome with an extra tab with shortcuts to other things. Gmail worked exactly as in Chrome or Firefox. I tried a few other things but it kept complaining about security certificates, and I didn’t feel too adventurous.

It was slow, but that is to be expected since it is a VM, and I am running the disk image from a USB drive so it is not fair to hold that against it. There’s not much else to say, it simply works. It is a PC with nothing but a browser in it. I noticed very few distractions on the screen. There is a menu to turn on and off ethernet and WiFi, and that’s about it. I can’t even figure out how to change the video resolution.

If Google can get away with this, it is going to be great. Who gives a shit about the data in the cloud? If all you need is the ability to deal with email, office documents and light things like these, then this is definitely going to work.