How do I install Chrome OS?

Question

Could I get Chrome OS working on my Raspberry Pi without having to compile anything?

I've heard somebody has compiled it for the Raspberry Pi, so I was wondering if anyone has had any experience in doing this.

Answer 1

Yes, but you have to compile it.

Hexxeh has been working on a build for the Raspberry Pi, as outlined in this blog post. The main issue with it is that it is really, really, slow. This is because there is no graphical acceleration.

Prerequisites

It is recommended that you have the following things before attempting to build Chromium OS.

1. A 64-bit build machine, running Ubuntu version 10.04 (other versions/distros might work, but aren't supported, you're on your own)
2. At least 4GB of RAM.
3. A fast Internet connection.

Get the Code

Now you need to get the actual Chromium OS code. You can find out how to do this at the Chromium OS Developer Guide.

Add the Overlay

Next you need to add the Raspberry Pi overlay to the source code. Find the directory named overlays in the src folder of the Chromium OS source code. Copy the overlay found in the Hexxeh/overlay-raspberrypi Github repro.

Toolchain Setup

First you must be inside the Chromium OS chroot. Refer to sectoin 4.2 of the developer guide if you are not sure how to do this. Second you need to be root to build the toolchain. This can be achieved via su or sudo -i. Then run the following command.

$ USE="-thumb -hardened hardfp" FEATURES="splitdebug" crossdev -S -t armv6j-cros-linux-gnueabi --ex-gdb

Now we can quit root via exit.

Board Setup

You only need to run this command once.

$ ./setup_board --board=raspberrypi

You'll also want to leave a backdoor for a development image to let yourself into the shell. You can do that via the following command.

$ ./set_shared_user_password

At the prompt enter the password and press enter. Tada.

Building an Image

First we need to make sure that we have all the required packages. We can get build these via.

$ ./build_packages --board=raspberrypi --withdev --nowithdebug --nousepkg --nowithautotest

Finally! You can build a USB image via.

$ ./build_image dev --board=raspberrypi --noenable_rootfs_verification

References

1. Overlay Raspberry Pi README

Answer 2

Have a look at http://hexxeh.net/. He has been working on a build. There are some BETA files you can download and compile but no full image has been released to date.