Chromium OS

Like Chrome OS, Chromium OS is based on the Linux kernel, but its principal user interface is the Chromium web browser rather than the Google Chrome browser. Chromium OS also includes the Portage package manager, which was originally developed for Gentoo Linux. Because Chromium OS and Chrome OS use a web browser engine for the user interface, they are oriented toward web applications rather than desktop applications or mobile apps.

Google first published the Chromium OS source code in late 2009.

Chromium's architecture is three-tiered, consisting of "three major components":

The Chromium-based browser and the window manager

System-level software and user-land services: the Linux kernel, drivers, connection manager, and so on

Firmware

By May 2010, compiled versions of the work-in-progress source code had been downloaded from the Internet more than a million times. The most popular version, entitled "Chromium OS Flow", was created by Liam McLoughlin, a then 17-year-old college student in Liverpool, England, posting under the name "Hexxeh". McLoughlin's build boots from a USB memory stick and included features that Google engineers had not yet implemented, such as support for the Java programming language. While Google did not expect that hobbyists would use and evaluate Chromium OS ahead of its official release, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management (now the CEO) said that "what people like Hexxeh are doing is amazing to see." Pichai said the early releases were an unintended consequence of open source development. "If you decide to do open-source projects, you have to be open all the way."

Hexxeh's work continued into the following year. He announced "Chromium OS Lime" in December 2010, and in January 2011, released "Luigi", an application designed to "jailbreak"/"root" the Google Cr-48 "Mario" prototype hardware and install a generic BIOS. The developer made the builds available in virtual machine format on March 13, 2011. With no official build of Chromium OS forthcoming from Google, Hexxeh's "vanilla" nightly builds of Chromium OS were the principal resource for people wanting to try Chromium OS. Hexxeh stopped uploading his builds on April 20, 2013.

More recent versions of Chromium OS are available from Arnoldthebat, who maintains daily and weekly builds along with usage guidelines and help. In July 2012, Chromium Build Kit was released. It automatically compiles a developer build and installs Chromium OS on a USB drive.