The Google Chrome OS is a web-centric operating system, which every application will be web-based and launch in a browser. And the OS itself is just a launchpad of the browser. If you wanna try out the Chrome OS on your netbook, now you can get the Chrome OS on a USB stick, allows you to boot it and run on your netbook.

The USB version of the Chrome OS was built by Hexxeh, and he’s setup a website that includes Windows, Linux and Mac instructions on how to get the Chromium OS image onto a USB stick. The Chrome OS image can be downloaded as a torrent from here or the mirror link by Engadget. And of course, you’ll then need to use a torrent client like uTorrent to download the .tar.gz version of the Chrome OS image, which is about 300+MB.

If you’re doing it on Windows, it’s kinda easy, extract the Chrome OS image from the downloaded chromiumos.tar.gz. Download the Windows version of Image writer and launch it, then select where the Chrome OS image and the USB drive letter for writing the image to.

Once you’ve done this, then you’ll have then got an USB-bootable Chrome OS which you can try on your netbook. If you’ve got some problems on booting it up, then you’ll have to find out more how to get a USB OS to boot on a netbook. The instruction on getting Windows 7 to boot from a USB drive here may help.

Please take note: the current version of Chrome OS lack of lots of drivers, which means some parts of your computer may not work when using Chrome OS. For example WiFi, WiFi will fail as no driver yet. Also note Google is targeting to release a device with native Chrome OS support in end of 2010.