Lime: Chromium OS with extra hardware support

Following nearly a one year delay, web developer and hacker Liam "Hexxeh" McLoughlin has released new builds of Lime, a customised Chromium OS-based operating system. Chromium OS is the open source branch of Google's Chrome OS, the company's minimalist Linux-based operating system that is built around the Chrome web browser.

McLoughlin, a student at University of Central Lancashire, says that the new Lime builds were delayed because he wanted to automate the process so that images could be updated on a daily basis, instead of having to be hand-built each time. His new system automatically provides a "freshly baked" image with all of the new features and tweaks from the bleeding edge Vanilla builds.

Chromium OS Lime in action
Source: chromeos.hexxeh.net Compared to the developer's Vanilla Chromium OS builds, Lime has been enhanced to include extra hardware support for a number of components. These include the Broadcom BCM43XX, Ralink RT24XX, RT28XX and RT30XX, and R8187SE, R8712U, RTL73, RTL8180, RTL8187 and RTL8192XX Wi-Fi chipsets, as well as NVIDIA 6 series and newer GPUs. However, as the builds are updated daily, some builds may work better than others. The developer also notes that users can contact him via @hexxeh on Twitter or his Google+ page and request support for specific hardware that isn't currently supported, provided a Linux driver exists.

More details about the release can be found in a blog post by McLoughlin. Download links and instructions for creating a Lime build of Chromium OS are provided on the project's homepage.

See also:

• Google's Chrome OS machines arrive, a report from The H.
• Chromium OS - Digging deeper into the open source Chrome OS, a 2009 feature from The H.

(crve)