Has anyone played around with Chrome OS on unofficial x86 systems?

Looking to expose myself to Google Chrome OS without spending money on a Chromebook because I dont need an additional computer to the many ( 14 ) that I already have.

When the Chromebooks came out with the chromeOS I figured it would be another short lived OS just like Lindows was on cheap computers from Walmart back in 2002. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/51834-walmart-microtel-ship-199-lindows-pc

Back in 2002 when Lindows came out there was only 1 client who accidentally bought one based solely on the cheap price tag, but when he wanted to install software to it that required Windows, he quickly found out that his Lindows OS computer was not able to serve the purpose he bought it for. On top of that the hardware that was this build was a low end processing power Via C3 800Mhz CPU and so he pretty much bought a VIA C3 Snail instead of a Pentium 4 Rabbit for processing power hardware with a Turtle being the Celeron's back in the day. For some reason he was unable to return it to walmart and owned it. He tried to sell it for 1/2 what he paid for it and no one would bite at it. And eventually he spent more money to GET a better Athlon XP CPU system, and he gave this Lindows computer to his nephew to have. The nephew ended up installing Windows Me on it from what I was told but couldnt do much gaming on it so it was even short lived with him, but free is free for a working computer.

The Lindows was a complete failure OS, and Walmart soon stopped selling systems with Lindows.

I expected Google ChromeOS to follow this same failure as for you have people who need Windows or Mac OS and then those who want Linux are generally those who are educated enough to put it on their own systems and support themselves.

Google ChromeOS was also being installed on low processing power hardware which is the same as the Lindows systems that were released around 2002. And I expected a repeat in history.

BUT ChromeOS systems seem to have been far more accepted than that of Lindows 12 years ago, and so I am now getting questions from multiple users of Chromebooks of how do you do this and that, and I simply state to them that I'd perform a google SEARCH on how to do that and there should be plenty of info to assist you, because I myself havent been exposed to ChromeOS yet to be able to assist directly.

So after the 5th request for assistance and one guy turning on his Chromebook and asking me questions in which I was looking at the GUI totally new to the ChromeOS, I was talking to him and came right on out and stated this is the first time I have played with ChromeOS, so I am going to poke around to see if I can find an answer to your question, but the feature could have been hidden anywhere in the OS. I realized that ChromeOS MAY be an OS to stay and evolve and that I better expose myself to it to be able to support it.

I found online this site that offers download of ChromeOS built to run on various hardware and I am going to check it out on a spare computer I have. It just requires a 4GB flash drive to install. I am hoping it can run live off of the USB drive, but we will see.

http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

Also the site states the following below, which give me the feeling that it might not work, and if it does work it will be missing features.

Quote

You're about to download Chromium OS!

Before you download, let's just confirm a few things. These builds:

    Are totally unofficial Chromium OS builds and do not represent the full Chrome OS experience
    Are offered without any support whatsoever, you use them at your own risk
    Do NOT automatically update, you'll need to download a new build regularly if you wish to update
    Do NOT include Flash, Java or the Google Voice/Video plugin for licensing reasons
    May simply not boot on your hardware: not all configurations work! Please don't ask me to fix
    this for your machine.