Chromium OS

Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web.

All downloads are located at https://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/. This will be updated daily where builds compile succcessfully..

Build Instructions for USB

  • Linux
    1. Use p7zip to extract the IMG file from the downloaded file.
    2. At the shell, run the following (where sdX is your USB stick and ChromeOS.img is the path to the IMG file you extracted):
      dd if=ChromeOS.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
    3. Boot from USB stick
  • Windows
    1. Use 7zip to extract IMG file from the downloaded file.
    2. Use Win32 Image Writer, then select the IMG file and select the USB device from the menu.
    3. Click on “Write”.
    4. Boot from USB stick

All builds based on amd64 and ARM generic board.

If you want to install to your hard drive, follow the instructions here and here. Heed the warnings noted in the links!

Please note: there is a new behaviour with the chronos user password. The password has been removed from build R55-8777 onward and will continue to be removed for better overall security. Older builds have the password of ‘password’.
This means you need to use ‘chromeos-setdevpasswd’ from either shell or console to set your own password from build R55-8777 onwards.

By default, this also disables SSH access so if you also need this level of access, you will need to set a separate password using ‘sudo passwd chronos’. This allows the password for dev access and SSH access to remain separate if needed.

You can also just set a password using ‘sudo passwd chronos’ and this will allow for both dev and SSH access if you need to keep them the same. Do not use ‘chromeos-setdevpasswd’ if you want to keep the passwords the same.

Once installed, you can update from the Dev Server noted here.

Thanks to The Chromium Projects

Chromium OS GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE




2,715 thoughts on “Chromium OS”

  1. Hi Arnold, thanks for your hard work! Do you know if any of your distributions are compatible with the tablet Lenovo ThinkPad 8? This is a 32 bit UEFI Bios tablet, with Atom Z3770, 2Gb ram e 64Gb storage. A prety nice tablet for use with ChromeOS.

      1. I tried your lastest Special Build on my Miix 300, also 32bit UEFI. But I encountered an issue. By default, that display is 800×1280 (9:16) so some things on setup are hidden and it will not auto rotate.

    1. Hi, I’ve tried on my Lenovo Tablet 2 but i’m getting a black sreen while trying to boot from USB then nothing happens. Secure boot is disabled. Any idea?

      Regards.

    2. Hi Arnold,
      When I shut down Chromium OS special, the screen turns black but the lights of the laptop wont go out.
      Is this a known issue? Is this fixable?
      I user an Acer Aspire laptop.
      Thanks in advance!

  2. I’m stuck on “booting local image a or local image b” I’ve created multiple time with multiple usb drive and it gave me the same result! What’s happening?

  3. 340/5000
    I’m trying to install Google Chrome OS in VirtualBox on an x64 PC.
    I downloaded “Camd64OS-20181012010101.img.7z” and retrieved the .img file but when I try to mount it in Windows 10 an error occurs “the .img file is corrupted”. I tried to download other files from the “Daily” folder but the result is the same.
    What should I do?

  4. Hi there,
    My chrome://flags content is gone. Is there a trick? If I use chromiumos as a guest the content is shown.

  5. Hi have you tried it installing in the virtualbox because I want to try it first on virtualbox and then install it alongside linux mint. I dont wanna mess up my system.

  6. Thanks for all the hard work!

    Two things I’ve noticed. I have attempted on two different devices.
    1. Bluetooth will not turn on in settings.
    2. When I log in after a fresh install the machine is not registering me as the owner. Thus I cannot disable the guest account which I need to do.

      1. Hi
        What is the story with the owner, and not being able to disable Guest mode, or manage users? Using the latest 72 special.

        Many thanks for your work!

  7. I have tried both the most recent Special and Vanilla and I cannot disable the Guest account from settings. Doing a power-wash makes no difference. The daily and weekly builds don’t boot on my device, Lenovo S210 touch, so I am unable to see if these have the same issue. Please advise. (I need to disable the guest mode for my children’s safety)

  8. Can your builds works with Amlogic SoC? They are extremely popular in TV players, currently i’m using Armbian in my player, but Chromium would be much better.
    Latest kernel can be found at:
    https://github.com/Elyotna/linux/tree/chromium-v4l2
    This kernel support video driver with v4l2 m2m, i hope that chromium OS can be build with this video driver. It is only for arm64, can’t boot armhf.
    I’m willing to help, just send me source and some simple instruction (kernel is easy to compile, but never tried to build full chromium os).

    1. You was able to do it? I’m interested in this, if I download the image then I flash it in a usb then boot up in the TV Box, it can boot or it’s different?

  9. Arnold,

    First off, I think you’re awesome for keeping this project alive for so long. I have a lot of respect for your hard work.

    That said, I’m having a bit of a challenge. A friend of mine has an old laptop, 32 bit 2.3ghz processor and 800MB of visible RAM. It’s running Vista at the moment and is ridden with viruses so I want to solve this problem for my friend by delivering him a rather foolproof OS that’s able to run some kind of (light) office suite and is able to send and receive email, as this is the only thing he needs it for.

    At the moment I’m thinking of installing some light form of like Linux on it, but chromium has been suggested by a forum member and I think it could make sense. Do you think his system will manage chromium?

    Thanks in advance.

  10. Hi,
    I having been trying to install one of your builds to my Lenovo Thinkpad laptop. I have it installed to a usb stick, which will boot up into the Os. I can log onto my account. I have been trying to install this from my usb to the computer’s hard drive. I have done this.. please advise (if you can) on what I have done:
    in crosh install from dev/sdb to dev/sda
    this will erase all your date at the destination:/dev/sda
    Are you sure? y/N
    I answer yes and then I get the message:Ok, better safe than sorry; you answered “yes” and then I am at the crosh prompt.
    I am totally at a loss at what do do next. I would appreciate your advice on what to do next. Thanks.
    Paul
    frustrated but having some fun, too
    thanks for your hard work here..

  11. Nice work! I have the live usb running and want to install it to my hard drive. /usr/sbin/chromeos-install gives me

    initctl: Unknown instance:
    Error: can not determine destination device. Specify –dst yourself.

      1. So what if you want to install the os onto your external hard drive connected to the pc, after booting using a pendrive?

  12. I have a desktop PC with i7-4790k I can boot from USB using special build without any problem. Everything works normal. When I’m trying to install it to HDD/SSD installation goes normal maybe except two warnings: Primary GPT header is invalid/ doing a slow DD operation please fix. After installation I’m stuck at grub booting to image A or chromium logo. Already tried to wipe disk with sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress . Is there anything I can do to make it work?

  13. Hi Arnold,
    I can boot from usb without any problems but when I’m trying to boot from ssd/hdd I’m always stuck on “booting – local image A”, but when I insert USB boot drive in that screen it boots from it. Any solutions? During install I got only warning about Invalid primary gpt header.

  14. Hi Arnold!
    I’m super happy to see that with your img I’m able to run chromium on my laptop! Everything works like a charm except the wifi.
    Have installed it using the cable, but can you explain how I might be able to fix the wifi?
    I’m using a broadcom bcm42338.
    Is there a way to load Linux drivers or something similar?
    Thanks in advance! 🙂

    1. This worked for BCM43241. Amend according if appropriate:

      1. cp /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/*nvram* brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt

      “you need to edit brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt and remove all non-text parts”

      sudo mv brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt /lib/firmware/brcm/

      Need to go to console for these commands.

  15. I converted the IMG file to a VDI using VBoxManage convertfromraw, and I was able to run it on VirtualBox, but it hangs with a message like: “Performing relocations… done. Booting the kernel.” and stays there indefinitely.

  16. Hi Arnold,
    Just installed your latest special 64-bits image. Installation went OK until it tried to initiate “Google Play” which runs for some time and then displays an error stating that something went wrong.
    Sofar I could not find a solution.
    Any hint would be appreciated.
    Hans

  17. In the meantime I saw your remarks about “Play Store not working”. Sorry.
    Is there any “Chromium OS” version yet with Google Play working?
    Hans

  18. There is no way i can boot latest builds on my laptop with legacy support only. It simply does not start grub. Usb flash is ok, i can boot it on my Desktop. Also i can boot any other linux on my laptop.
    What is latest version which works with old legacy bios and can it be upgraded after install? Or is it better to create manually mbr partitions, dd from usb and install grub?

    1. I solved problem, my bios requires mbr so it can boot. I added from bootable linux usb one 64mb partition (sdb13) with type bios boot (fdisk number 4), then with gdisk made hybrid partition table with just this partition 13. Then installed grub, created grub.cfg on /dev/sdb3 and chromium booted. Reapeted everything on hdd after install.
      Actually it works really good 🙂
      Touchpad is not working, i will try tomorrow some configs i found.
      And i will test linux apps.

  19. Hi Arnold, thanks for your great work. My CPU is Intel i5 and when I load the x64 img from USB, it always stuck in a black screen… I just wondering the reason and anything i can do to resolve this problem? Many thx.

    Br.

    David

  20. Work for me:
    1.- logging in with ‘chronos’
    2.- mount -a
    3.- Lsblk -h
    (Shows the mounting points in GB, Search destination media point)
    4.- /usr/sbin/chromeos-install –dst=/dev/sda
    (replace sda with your media)

  21. Hi Arnold,

    I wanted to try Chrome on a virtual machine. So, I downloaded and converted the chromiumos_image.img to .vmdk (for VMWare)

    It boots up but gets stuck at:
    ==============================

    SYSLINUX 6.03 EDD 2014-10-06 Copyright © 1994-2014 H. Peter Anvin at al
    Loading vmlinuz.A…ok

    early console in decocmpress_kernel
    input_data: øx01594B79
    input_len: 0x004ee713
    output: øx01øøøøøø
    output_len: 0x00a7126c
    run size: 0x00e03000
    KRSLR using RDRAND RDTSC. ..

    Decompressing Linux… Parsing ELF… Performing relocations… done.
    Booting the kernel.
    _

  22. Touchscreen not working on HP Pavilion TouchSmart 14 Sleekbook model number 14-b109wm everything else works fine both special and vanilla builds. For reference this laptop has the exact same hardware as HP Chromebook 14 (butterfly board)

  23. Can you run ADB for Android on this OS? I use ADB a lot so I was wanting to know if you can use it on this OS before installing

    Thanks in advance!
    Great work.

  24. Hi Arnold,
    I am using sony vaio fit 13a with intel i5 processor. i tried different amd builds and also special builds . While booting it gets stuck at black screen after selecting the bootable drive. Cloudready and other chromium os are working fine. What To do?
    TIA

  25. Awesome work, can’t believe how well it works on my MacBook.

    I’m thinking about buying a cheap windows intel tablet, are you aware of any models which have been successfully tried and we’ll supported ?

  26. I enounter a problem an an acer w700 i3 with 4gb ram and 64gb ssd an a dell latitude 6220 with an i3 8gb ram and an 250gb samsung ssd in it.

    I used win32disk imager to create an usb drive with the latste daily build img on 3 different drives 1 sandsk ultra 32gb and 2 totaly new pny 32gb usb pen drives al formated as fat 32 and after win32 was done it would not boot. the bios on booth devices sees a uefi device but it stays black.

    what can i do to correct this.
    Have also tried the img file CARMOS-20190101 as wel as CARMOS-2019030101.img booth same out come also tried etcher but same result.

    if i check the efi boot partition it is empty so there is nu efi boot file there.

    hope this can be fixed the dell is strugeling a bit with windows 10 and is only used for light browsing so crome os would be an ideal os on it.

    the w700 is a touch device but barely used so geting chrom os on it would be nice to test touch input.

    regards
    Michel

  27. Hi i cant get the chrome os to install to de ssd, it keeps saaying can not determine destination device.

    have an ssd in my laptop and the usb .

    How can i check in the console witch device is seen
    so i can set de dst flag with the right one.

    Michel

  28. I would like to thank you for your work, I have sent you a beer ( Transaction ID 63V4026701691670X) for your hard work.

    I only used your builds “chromified” lately, might find some time to use them later and give you some feedback.. for now i have been using your special build 69 with eve recovery.

  29. Hi Arnold,

    I installed the special build on my Mac, used chromefy to update the rootfs with the Eve (Pixelbook) image and everything worked fine apart from some hardware issues. So in Crostini, I rebuilt the kernel 4.14.65 to add in missing drivers, copied the boot image over to sda12 and copied the modules over to /lib/modules/4.14.65 and it all worked nicely with hardware support. I used your .config from your overlay git repo but make was asking for some additional items around SoC sound drivers. However crostini and Android no longer start with this new kernel – any ideas what I might have missed ?

      1. I guess the shoddy way I’m building the kernel must be missing some Dbus VM integration. I guess I’ll try just building the entire Chromium project like you must do. Thanks for sharing your overlay repo.

        ChromeOS is going to be so cool very soon.

  30. Hi Arnold,

    Does this work with AMD graphics chip machines? I have a Samsung All-in-one from 2014 that I have only been able to get cloudready to run on, and have been trying to get a more standard partitioned chromium to run on, with no success. Burning this image to USB now to see if it will boot, but thought I would ask in the mean time.

    Zain

  31. My Dell Inspiron laptop has been running Chromium Vanilla builds for over a year but since I upgraded to V69 it has been very slow to boot from the SSD. When I later did a clean install there as a “Slow DD” error message. I assumed a SSD problem but it boots ok in other computer. I installed Cloudready V70 on the SSD and timed boot to login screen as 21 seconds. I just installed V72 Special on the same SSD and that takes 2min 40sec to login screen. Booting V72 from USB or the SD card takes 36 seconds to login!

  32. I have a UEFI arm tablet that can boot from other USB devices. However there is nothing in the boot partition (/dev/sdb12 or whatever your flash drive is mounted as). I even tried mounting it as root in linux and using the dir command but nothing shows up. So how does the CARM image boot

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