Chromium OS for SBC aimed to bring Chromium operating systems to low cost development boards such as the Raspberry Pi 3 board, but the website is now down, and the developer announced he had stopped working on it several months ago due the hardware limitations of the Raspberry Pi 3 board. But others decided it was still worth the effort, and created Flint Innovation company (based in UK/China) to develop Flint OS, a build of Chromium OS with optimizations for Raspberry Pi 3 and Firefly-RK3288 boards with more boards likely coming soon.
The developers also provide an x86 image, but after asking more details, it turns out they only changed the boot splash screen for now on the x86 image, with most of the early work done on Raspberry Pi board:
At this moment our public Flint OS releases are still pretty much vanilla Chromium OS (we changed the boot splash screen). Our efforts so far have been focused on getting Chromium OS to run on more hardware platforms other than Google approved ones, with a special focus on ARM-based embedded systems. This is also why we found your site 🙂Flint is still at its very early stage, going forward we plan to bring enhancements for the application layer too. For starters, we have planed to modify the activation/authentication mechanism that Google has built-in for only allowing Google account login.
If you’d like to give it a try, head to the download page for either:
- Flint OS for RPi v0.2.1 “Beetle” image based on Chromium 55
- Flint OS for PC v0.2.1 based on Chromium 55
They also have a Flint OS for Firefly-RK3288 v0.1 based on Chromium 57 in their Chinese download page, and uploaded a short demo with HTML5 video playback in YouTube. The image can be flashed to a USB drive or micro SD card with Etcher, Win32DiskImager, or other common tools.
A build working with VMWare/VirtualBox is also in the works, but there are still some blockers with regards to the graphics driver. Note that while Chromium OS itself is open source, and Flint Innovation intends to comply with open source licenses (GPL and others), Flint OS is not fully open source, and the company offers consulting & customization services, as well as IT-as-a-Service for schools and businesses.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Chromium OS has had many versions.
I try the Raspberry Pi version and is barely usable, far away for been an alternative to any other desktop.
Perhaps a just enough Android OS. with Chromium approach might work better?
Interesting and useful project for Chromium OS Build
I try it on Firefly RK3288, it works well. Flint OS also can use on Firefly RK3399