Just days away from an event at Google where the company will reveal more about one of their rumored and now confirmed projects - Chrome OS, package files and pictures have leaked showing the operating system (or at least the browser part of it) running on top of an Ubuntu install with themes and a new logo.
The files that leaked were hosted on a public Google server, and were found by Living in a Google World earlier this week. The operating system which is very unstable (as expected) was leaked for only a few hours, and then taken down - but not before some users got copies of the files.
The part of the Operating System we can see here, at this point, looks like the Linux variant of Chrome, but with new universal themes and a new logo - that when clicked sends you to Google Short Links (which we don"t know about either) - but this requires a Google.com account, which are reserved for Google Employees. At this point the "Chrome OS" is actually running on top of Ubuntu.
In addition to this, on Thursday night Google is hosting an event to reveal more about the operating system and other emerging Google technologies. This recent invite was sent out to some bloggers:
"Join us for an evening at Google featuring presentations by Paul Rademacher on Google Maps and Ben Goodger on Chrome OS. Presentations will be followed by a short Q&A. Once the formalities have finished there will be further opportunity to meet and mingle with other attendees as well as Googlers from Chrome/ChromeOS, Maps, GMail and Search. Oh, and of course there will be plenty of food and beverages for everyone. We hope to see you there!"
Not much else is known about the sperating system at the moment, but Chrome OS is expected to be a very bare-bones OS, relying on the cloud for most of it"s operations (for obvious reasons).
Edit: Title corrected.
View the screenshots below:
Chrome OS Options Tab:
Chrome OS Home Screen (Note the logo on the top left):
Example of Chrome OS running a theme:
Example of Chrome OS running a theme: