Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to test out chromium os on a raspberry pi 4. chromium os is a web-based open source operating system that's designed to be fast simple and secure chromium os is also the foundation for chrome os that runs on chromebook laptops so let's go and take a closer look chromium os began its life in november 2009 when google decided to open source for development of its chrome os web-based operating system so just as the chromium browser is an open source version of google chrome so chromium os is an open source version of chrome os both initiatives come under the banner of the chromium projects which has a website over here where as you see we can click on the web pages for chromium os and the thing you'll notice here that these are fairly technical resources all intended for developers but fortunately for us a company called fidos have developed chromium os for the raspberry pi which they maintain here on github again these pages are mainly for developers this is fairly technical stuff but there is another page they have over here which contains images for the raspberry pi 3b 3b plus 4b and pi 400. and of course i'll give you a link to this page in the video description it's also worth noting that fidos have produced a commercial product called fido s4u raspberry pi 400 which is a chromium-based operating system that runs as you can guess on the raspberry pi 400. and this has got a 90-day trial period after which there is an annual subscription which in the top of making this video is on a promotion at 12.99 a year and i may well look at fidos for s4u raspberry pi 400 in a video in the future but this video will focus solely on the entirely free chromium os for raspberry pi so let's go down to the download section which is somewhere down here there we are there's our download so we'll download the image i'm going to save it in my raspberry pi download folder which is getting quite crowded so we'll save it like that and with the download complete i'm going to bring up belena etcher where i'll select the image where is it down there that's the one chromium os raspberry pi etc i've already inserted a micro sd card into my laptop which we can write the image to remember when you write an image file to a microsd card it'll delete everything on the card but we'll now click on flash windows will check we want to do it yes we do and etcher will create and then verify a chromium os boot media for a raspberry pi full right let's now take our micro sd card and insert it into a raspberry pi 4 there we go and i'll now turn on the power and hopefully we will now boot up yes it seems things are happening as little lights on the pi you can't see that i can oh yes we've got the pi spectrum we're now booting into chromium os and because this is our first boot oh look it says chromium because it is our first boot we'll have to enter things like our wi-fi details to get online but also details of a google account and oh look we're here we've got an exciting animation i'm just going to change my language here to english united kingdom and also my keyboard to uk or have problems entering an email address there we are as you can see the interface here has been designed by members of the very small fonts society but we can i'm sure fix the scaling later on so for now we'll just click on get started and we need to connect to a network so i'll just get on with that there we go and it's checking for updates there we are who's going to use this chromebox i think it will be me indeed so i'll click on next and we now need to sign in and the reason we need to sign in is that chromium os is a web-based operating system so if you're not prepared to give details of a google account you shouldn't be using chromium os so i'll just put in the details of one of my many google accounts and i just need to go through a little bit of a two-step verification unless it's in there on a tablet with a google prompt and oh look there we are we're ready we can get started that's exciting isn't it and here we are in chromium os and it seems that the installer hasn't quite closed itself down so we'll give it a little hand but here we are on the chromium os desktop and i can now go down to the bottom corner over here and go into settings up there and if we go to device and we go to displays we can actually set the size of font so it can be seen by an average human being there we are we've got a better size of display and this is basically it chromium os is a browser-based a web-based operating system so we've obviously got a browser down here we can access we've got our file manager if we want to look at files with nothing on this system yet but we could look at it there if we wanted to we can pull up this thing which is called the shelf and we can do things like a google search we can get to our file to the browser to settings as we just saw let's just launch the browser again just to prove it works can we get to the world's favorite website it seems we can and we can learn about sbcs like the raspberry pi 4 yes it seems things are working and so for now i think that's enough excitement with chromios for one segment of the video and so i'll show you the important thing how do you shut things down we've got a shutdown button just over here so we'll come out of chrome os and i'll come back to you in the next segment of the video greetings here i am back again shall we reboot the pie with chromium os yes let's do that and the reason i wanted to come out and boot up again was to show you the boot speed on the typical boot so i'll hit the power there we go and we'll see how long it takes to boot up this time very exciting i've got things rigged up here via a video mixer so i was recording the pie when it was off which is a clever trick isn't it all sorts of things you can do with technology these days there we are we've arrived at the chromium logo how long will it take to get to the chromium operating system itself there we are that was pretty quick wasn't it just over 20 seconds and from here i seem to become a penguin i could log in as you as you would guess but i also want to show you that in chromium os you don't have to log in you can browse as guest so if i click down here to browse as guest it will let me through like that and this will give us a web-based session which as it explains here won't do anything to my browser history anything we save any cookies that gets saved will disappear after the session so this is actually quite handy if people want to use the machine who don't want to put in the details of their google account or if you just want a quick browsing session where nothing will be recorded let's go to explaining the future.com if i can type that right no i can't i can type it wrong best to type it right chris it always works better that way there we are what a strange mood i'm in today yes we've got to be explaining the future website so there we are i proved we can browse as a guest in chromium os guess what here i am back again and as you can see i've changed my desktop background changed the wallpaper if i right click here there's all sorts of lovely wallpapers available to use in chromium os on the pipe and i think i'll also change the settings for what's called the shelf the taskbar the panel down here right clicking again we can change its position if we wanted to but i'm going to auto hide the shelf so we've got more space to work with on our screen when we're using a web browser and as you can see i've been trying out different applications basically online applications because that's what we run in chromium os here i am accessing google drive and here are various documents including the script file for this very video which is strange to see in this very video but i've opened up this file from a few weeks ago which is my windows 365 video script file and it's perfectly possible to work very happily here in google docs in chrome os on a raspberry pi we can of course also access gmail because we're on a system where we've logged in with a google account but here i've gone to my microsoft mail which comes up perfectly happily as well and we can from here access things like the online versions of word excel and powerpoint and just to prove that here is the online version of word running like that the online version of excel with some very important data and the online version of powerpoint so basically if the software you need to use has got a sas the software is a service version you can use it here in chrome os on a raspberry pi we just minimized that you might have noticed i've added some applications down here to the shelf i've done that by going to the software store the web store over here just bring that up that shows us all the different things we can add to chromium the chrome web store like that all sorts of things are available and let's just get rid of that be tidy and the ones i've added are photo photopia which is like a photoshop alternative which runs in a browser very nice package i've gone through this in detail on my video on photoshop alternatives but great photoshop compatibility and let's just do a new document like that and bring that up there we are and uh what should we do let's scribble with a brush where's the brush going christopher it's always up there look there we are and we can just uh scribble with a brush isn't that exciting yes we could do things here in this uh photoshop alternative i've also let's get rid of that as you can see added youtube got to add youtube and the thing you'll notice when we bring these apps up is they aren't running with an address bar we're not in chromium here but we can go into chromium if we wish like that and therefore we're seeing things with the address bar and i think i'll just bring up just because i'm sure you want to know what would happen my test clip which we so often use in these videos can we play the test clip i'll just get it running for you here it is let's just try and take it up to 1080p and we'll bring up stats for nerds how well will it play it's not doing too bad so far actually there are some drop frames as you can see but not very many this is pretty reasonable playback in a browser in chromium os here on a raspberry pi so i'm quite impressed with that we'll let that continue to play along making that strange 3d printed food thing whilst a steam engine does its thing in the foreground but there we are 1080p youtube playback is not too bad hearing chromium os on a raspberry pi 4. now a few weeks ago on the channel i made a video about windows 365 the new online version of windows and many people ask me in the comments on that video could you access windows 365 from a raspberry pi and so as i'm now on a raspberry pi in a video in a web-based operating system no less i thought we'd try it out i bought myself a one-month subscription to windows 365 to try it out it hasn't come to an end yet so let's make use of it so let's bring up a web browser where as you can see i've gone to the windows 365 website and brought up the page it shows my cloud pc so let's access it in a browser see if it works here on the pi and hopefully it will we will find out in a second and i'll just have to log in there we go and here we are in windows 365 on the raspberry pi it's not quite scaled the screen correctly let's try and do a does that help us now we've still got slight problem now we can't see everything on the screen at once but never mind and we can get to a menu this is quite reasonably responsive i think we will see let's run something up what have we got to run up we've got the let's run up the photo app but this is responsive this is certainly usable so the answer is can you run windows 365 on the raspberry pi 4 the answer is yes you can because that's what we're doing here we've got a crystal disk mark sitting there we can run that up and uh that'll work hopefully yes we could do a disk speed test if we wanted to on our cloud pc we've done that already i don't think we'll do it again anyway it proves a point doesn't it let's open up my pc everything is still there and uh things are working oh look microsoft windows wants to uh i would guess update itself we have to be running a real version of windows if it wants to update itself anyway we've proved a point it's possible to access windows 365 on a raspberry pi here specifically running chromium os os for raspberry pi brings a chromebook like experience to our favorite single board computer and if you want to turn a raspberry pi into a fast boot web console then it's a great choice of operating system but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 104,775

Keywords: ChromiumOS, Chromium OS, Chromium OS Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Chromium OS, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, FydeOS, Photopea, Windows 365, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 400, Raspberry Pi FydeOS

Id: 0dVd5M04u20

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021