How to install Chromium OS on a Raspberry Pi?

Chromium_OS

Many of you will know or have heard about Chrome OS, which is the Google operating system that sends to its chromebooks and even that there are compilations of this system, which are provided by third parties, not everyone dares to try it.

In this case, for those who have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 and are curious to be able to use this system, they should know that Chromium OS exists which is open source and It is based on the development versions of Chrome OS. Chromium OS was built on the basis of a Linux kernel, in an Ubuntu 10.04 environment, using the official package manager of the Gentoo Linux distribution, Portage. Therefore, it is a hybrid between Ubuntu and Gentoo, based on both Linux distributions.

Chromium OS use page tabs included in Google Chrome to open the web applications. Chromium OS provides a clock, battery indicator, and network status indicator.

Before going to the download links and how to install it? It is important to mention that currently the unofficial builds of Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi is in "test" mode And as we mentioned it is only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3, 3B + and 4.

Since it is in "test" mode, some operating system features are not yet availableIn addition to that errors are present and things can go wrong at random times.

Besides that there is still no hardware acceleration support to decode the video stream.

Download Chromium OS for Raspberry PI

For those interested in being able to test Chromium OS on their Raspberry Pi, you can download the already compiled image from the FydeOS GitHub, which can be accessed from the following link

At the moment the system is in its version 77 r2, so to download the image of this version just open a terminal and type the next if you have a Raspberry Pi 3 / 3B:

wget https://github.com/FydeOS/chromium_os_for_raspberry_pi/releases/download/r77-r2/chromiumos_test_image_r77r2-rpi3b.img.xz

Now, in the case of those who have a Raspberry Pi 4:

wget https://github.com/FydeOS/chromium_os_for_raspberry_pi/releases/download/r77-r2/chromiumos_test_image_r77r2-rpi4b.img.xz

Installation

Installation Chromium OS image on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 works exactly the same as installing any of the other operating systems available for our device, since we just have to flash an IMG.XZ file to a Micro SD card.

For this we we can support from different tools, from the terminal to applications with user interface, of the most popular we can make use of a multiplatform tool (In case you don't use Linux, since it is cross-platform it works the same on Windows and Mac).

The tool I'm talking about is called Etcher and it is a tool that is very easy to use and works very well with the images of any system for a Raspberry Pi.

Just go to our web browser to download the tool, you can use your preferred search engine or go directly to their official website.

There can download the most current version and install it on your computer, for Windows it is offered in an exe, while for Linux it is offered as an AppImage with which you only have to give execution permissions and double-click on the file.

Once the application is open, you can see that it has a fairly intuitive interface sincee just have to connect your SD card With the help of an adapter or if they have the slot for it, just place it.

Immediately Etcher will recognize the card and if they have any other USB storage device connected, this will appear in the list since it will only show those, the hard drives and partitions ignore them (except for external HDDs).

Already identified your deviceor just select the path where you placed the image and click start.

At the end you will be notified.  Now you just have to put the SD in your Raspberry and connect it to the power to start the system.

As a final step, just you will have to make a small configuration, which is quite familiar when you start a new android device or factory reset it.

Will ask you connect your keyboard, mouse and any other device you are going to work with in the system, which configure the network and finally log in with your Google account. And that's it, you can start working with Chromium OS on your Raspberry Pi.


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