Chromium OS Ported to Raspberry Pi

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Anyone interested in messing around with Chromium OS on your Raspberry Pi can hit this link for the download. There isn't much you can do with it right now but its there if you want it.

Right now the OS does little more than boot up, but if the embedded version of Chromium can be made to function without issue it could make browsing the web on the Broadcom SOC-sporting PC much less painful. Then again, performance is a big question mark. Seeing how much the 700MHz ARM11 chip struggled with the Midori browser, we wouldn't hold our breath for miracles.
Click to expand...
 
That's great news! Now the Raspberry Pi can become as useless as a $400 Chromebook! I think I just wet myself thinking about how much nothing I can do with what is otherwise a useful and interesting piece of vaporware.
 
SkribbelKat said:
That's great news! Now the Raspberry Pi can become as useless as a $400 Chromebook! I think I just wet myself thinking about how much nothing I can do with what is otherwise a useful and interesting piece of vaporware.
Click to expand...

what's vaporware, the pi or the chromeos?

if you had a pi (i got 3 of 'em) you'd know how bad the bundled browser is with it...

i would like to see this stable... although i see the pi as mainly a small low-powered play computer, i could see use for a machine like this to give to people that cost $35 that ran chrome... a poor person + a willingness to learn + a decent browser on a cheap computer = less poor people imo...
 
Personally I don't ever see the current models of the Raspberry Pi acting as a decent desktop computer until they get the graphics acceleration working with the desktop/windows managers.
The menus take a second to open which soon adds up if your opening and closing different applications.

Don't get me wrong its great for running OpenELEC and xbmc and I have a few project lined up for various things however I wouldn't like to use it for general usage.

imho its closer to being a supped up Arduino then a desktop computer and the soon people embrace it and make the most the better.
 
Raspberry Pi was intended to be a tinker toy. I'm surprised people somehow expected a full blown desktop replacement.
 
jpm100 said:
Raspberry Pi was intended to be a tinker toy. I'm surprised people somehow expected a full blown desktop replacement.
Click to expand...

Why can't it be a desktop? According to the FAQ on the site:

How powerful is it?
The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.
Click to expand...

A 300 MHz Pentium 2 had the stuff necessary to be a high end desktop a while ago. The Pi is more powerful in a lot of ways.
 
JoeDaStudd said:
I don't ever see the current models of the Raspberry Pi acting as a decent desktop computer until they get the graphics acceleration working with the desktop/windows managers.
Click to expand...
This

The GPU - which is the most powerful part of the device - is doing practically nothing for any kind of GUI acceleration.

I've been using mine for a low power command-line only system - Cacti, Nagios, etc. The only thing plugged into it are power and ethernet.

Everything changes once the GPU starts doing its share of the heavy lifting.
 
SkribbelKat said:
YOU HAVE 3 OF THEM?! Who did you murder?
Click to expand...

and i got put on waiting lists for both retailers when they went on sale... still got mine...

it wasn't that hard... you just have to actually buy one to get it...

crazy how that works...
 
goodcooper said:
and i got put on waiting lists for both retailers when they went on sale... still got mine...

it wasn't that hard... you just have to actually buy one to get it...

crazy how that works...
Click to expand...

Hehe, I gotcha. Don't mind me being bitter that I missed the first batch. :)

Once they went on backorder, I just stopped worrying about getting one until after they were manufactured in large enough numbers to clear the wait. What I thought was that if they managed to get to that level of production, there would be enough of them out there for most of the issues like the above mentioned GPU acceleration not being used to have been cleared up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top