Simone Carletti's Blog » vmware fusion

Google Chrome OS User Agent

Simone Carletti — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:35:04 +0000

Wondering how to detect Google Chrome OS in your server logs? Here’s how the Google Chrome OS user agent.

1	79.8.208.125 - - [20/Nov/2009:23:21:31 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2900 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5"

I logged the user agent browsing my website with a Google Chrome developer preview. And here’s the Google Chrome Browser user agent on my Mac OS X.

1	79.8.208.125 - - [20/Nov/2009:23:24:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2900 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.0 Safari/532.5"

As you can see, the browser token is the same because both Google Chrome OS and my Mac are running the same browser version. Google Chrome OS identifies itself with the CrOS i686 9.10.0 token, as you can see in the first user agent.

I’m wondering how long it takes before analytics software will start tracking Google OS users.

How to run Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion

Simone Carletti — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:44:17 +0000

As soon I finished watching the Google Chrome OS announcement video the first question that came to my mind was: Will it work on my Mac? Is it possible to run a Google Chrome OS preview using a virtualization software such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop?

The answer is yes. Google Chrome OS actually works inside a virtual machine.

If you are running VMWare or Virtual box, setting up a Google Chrome OS instance is really straightforward. Thanks to the guys at gdgt, you can download a Google Chrome OS image ready to be used with VMWare or VirtualBox. Also, Paul Miller from Engadget published an awesome screencast with a step-by-step tutorial to run Chrome OS as a virtual machine.

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Chrome OS virtual machine.

Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X using VMWare Fusion

VMware Fusion “The network bridge device on /dev/vmnet0 is not running” error

Simone Carletti — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:43:31 +0000

Yesterday one of my VMware virtual machines decided it wasn’t a good day to connect to internet and refused to use the macosx network bridge. When trying to enable the network bridge, I received the following error message:

1	The network bridge device on /dev/vmnet0 is not running

A quick online search revealed me multiple solutions but the most of them were targeting VMware 1.0. The error above in WMvare 2.0 or greater can be easily fixed typing the following command in the Terminal (thanks Aaron).

1	sudo /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh --restart

After a few seconds your virtual machine should automatically reconnect throught your macosx network bridge.