How to Install the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi

2016-05-16 | By Maker.io Staff

Raspberry Pi SBC

Chromium OS is the open source base for Google’s Chrome OS that powers many inexpensive laptops with a browser-focused operating system. If you’re looking for a computer to do basic web browsing and use cloud services like Google Docs then Chrome & Chromium OS are a perfect choice.

Chromium OS for SBC project offers a version of the operating system that can run on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. Although it’s still early in development and not super-fast, it does look like Chromium OS on the Pi 3 is off to a great start and could make an excellent basic web browsing machine.

Figure 1: Installing Chromium OS

Quick Start Guide

1. Download the Image file
2. Write it to an SD Card
3. Insert into Raspberry Pi 2 and Boot up
4. Enjoy

Download

• First head over to the downloads page and grab a fresh copy of the installation image.

Installing from a Windows PC

• Once the image file has downloaded you will need unzip it with a file utility that can unpack .7z files such as 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org) or winzip (http://www.winzip.com)
• Now that the file is unzipped you can write it to an SD card. You can use an image writer such as win32diskimager to burn the image to the SD card. Win32diskimager can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager
• Extract the executable from the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility; you may need to run this as administrator. Right-click on the file, and select Run as administrator.
• Select the Chromium OS image file you extracted earlier.
• Select the drive letter of the SD card in the device box. Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy the data on your computer's hard disk. If you are using an SD card slot in your computer and can't see the drive in the Win32DiskImager window, try using an external SD adapter.
• Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
• Exit the imager and eject the SD card.

Installing From Mac OS X

• If you are comfortable with the command line, you can write the image to a SD card without any additional software. Open a terminal, then run:
  diskutil list
• Identify the disk (not partition) of your SD card e.g. disk4, not disk4s1.
• Unmount your SD card by using the disk identifier, to prepare for copying data to it:
  diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk<disk#></disk#>
• where disk is your BSD name e.g. diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
• Copy the data to your SD card:
  sudo dd bs=1m if=image.img of=/dev/rdisk<disk#></disk#>
• where disk is your BSD name e.g.
  sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk4
• This will take a few minutes, depending on the image file size. You can check the progress by sending a SIGINFO signal (press Ctrl+T).
• This may result in a dd: invalid number '1m' error if you have GNU coreutils installed. In that case, you need to use a block size of1M in the bs= section, as follows:
  sudo dd bs=1M if=image.img of=/dev/rdisk<disk#></disk#>
• If this command still fails, try using disk instead of rdisk, for example:
  sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/disk4
• or
  sudo dd bs=1M if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/disk4