A Chromebook Experience Via USB Flash Drives
If you’re not familiar with ChromiumOS, it’s the open source version of Google’s Chrome operating system which is meant to work entirely with web applications. Most users have been out of luck to try it out on anything other than a Chromebook. As a result, web developer Liam McLoughlin (who in the online world goes by Hexxeh) just launched a customizable ChromiumOS version called Lime. What drew our attention to ChromiumOS Lime is that it can be written to a USB flash drive so that you can try it out on your own laptop, netbook or PC.
Linux, Windows and Mac users alike can accomplish this by first downloading their respective image via Hexxeh’s website. For Windows and Linux users, the IMG file needs to be extracted and written to the flash drive. Apple users will need to download the builder application to create the image that will go on their custom USB drives.
This open source version of ChromiumOS helps to exemplify what is so great and handy about our custom flash drives. They serve as the gateway between the programs we want and our system by giving us the means to use them. In this instance, Chromium Lime flash drives provide a variety of platform users a chance to sample the Chromebook experience before actually buying a Chromebook.
So why might you be interested in ChromiumOS Lime for your flash drive? In addition to providing an enhanced browsing experience complete with HTML5 and Flash support, extra plugins come standard. Hardware support is also boosted to include WiFi models as well as NVIDIA series GPUs and newer. What’s more is that Hexxeh says if there is a piece of hardware that isn’t being supported where there’s a Linux driver, you can contact him and he may add it to updated versions of Lime.
With a release that occurred just days ago, Chromium Lime had been delayed for close to a year. However, it has already been downloaded for USB in the past few days more than 30,000 times.
Thoughts? How do you feel about using portable USB browsers? We want to hear from you.
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