Bringing Chromium To The Raspberry Pi

If you’re in possession of a Raspberry Pi, you may want to check out the new Chromium support for your tiny pocketable computer. With its terrifically minimal hardware requirements, the Chromium OS seems like just the thing for this $35 computer.

The new Raspberry Pi supported Chromium build comes from the fruitful desktop of [Hexxeh], a.k.a. [Liam McLaughlin]. In the world of Chromium devs, [Hexxeh] has already made a name for himself by getting Chromium working on a Macbook Air, putting it in a VirtualBox, and generally being the resident wizard of the Chromium project

The Chromium OS should provide a much faster computing experience for the Raspi compared to the current Debian and Arch Linux-based builds.   Right now, the Chromium support for the Raspberry Pi is very much a work in progress but a slimmed-down, browser-only operating system may be just what the underpowered but useful 700 MHz ARM computer with 256 MB of RAM needs.

11 thoughts on “Bringing Chromium To The Raspberry Pi

  1. Why would Chromium make it a “faster computing experience” ? It’s mostly web apps afaik, how do you compare it with native code in terms of speed gains?

    1. When you are running really really low power hardware, and doing complex tasks, remote computing may be a faster experience than local computing, even with the network latency.

  2. Why are we focusing on spelling and grammatical errors.
    I wonder if it would have been easier on Google’s part to just use a modified version of android. I, like most others, would like to use the Raspberry Pi as a media computer. I would like to see a way for it to do different video codecs, Netflix, Hulu and a TV tuner. I think android would be best for that.
    Does anyone know off-hand what the minimum hardware requirements for android is?
    I couldn’t find a definitive answer for the different versions, but I didn’t look too hard either.

  3. ” I, like most others, would like to use the Raspberry Pi as a media computer. I would like to see a way for it to do different video codecs, Netflix, Hulu and a TV tuner. ”
    Great, dont forget to share all this with everyone when youre done. What I would like to see is less “I want this….I want that ….. ” forgetting that all this free stuff does take a lot of effort, and is driven by people doing the things they “would like to see”

  4. Why put a proprietary OS on a machine designed to be open source? I’ve got news for you: Google is far from infallible. Google might advertise chromium as open sourced but it’s not, they make boat loads of money off it simply through market penetration.

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