Chromium OS hacker Hexxeh has been working on porting the open source version of Google’s Chrome operating system to run on the $35 Raspberry Pi computer. While it’s still a work in progress, an initial commit of the Raspberry Pi board has been approved by the official Chromium OS team.
Right now this just means that the core Chromium OS can boot on the Raspberry Pi. It could be a while before we see a stable version of the operating system for the tiny computer. There isn’t even a user interface at this point.
Chrome and Chromium OS are basically operating systems designed around the Google Chrome web browser. Since they don’t have to load much software other than the browser, Â the operating systems tend to boot, sleep, and shut down quickly.
The recently release Samsung Series 5 Chromebook 550 with an Intel Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM runs much more smoothly than last year’s model with a slower Intel Atom processor and 2GB of memory — which makes me wonder how well the operating system will run on the Raspberry Pi’s 700 MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of memory.
via Hacker News
Can anyone let me know if there is anyway of getting on an email list for when this Chromium OS with a UI for the Pi will become available, as for me its a killer solution to support my own software! 😀
Just FYI, you don’t even get a UI with this yet. It’s been merged as a starting point once we have the appropriate drivers to make it run with the UI.
That’s what I figured, but I kept the article a little vague because I wasn’t sure just how much you had or hadn’t finished yet.
Still very cool. I’ve updated the post to clarify the current status a bit.
The Pi has 256MB RAM, not 512MB.
Whoops. I’ve updated the post. (I remembered that they doubled the RAM before shipping… but forgot that it was doubled from 128MB to 256MB, not from 256MB to 512MB).