Multimedia codecs are now installed out-of-the-box

Jan 22, 2016 00:42 GMT  ·  By

Dylan Callahan has the great pleasure of informing us today, January 22, 2016, about the immediate availability of the third build of his Chromium OS operating system for the Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer (SBC).

Chromium OS 0.3 has arrived for all you Raspberry Pi 2 fans out there, and it promises to bring an increase in performance of up to 8 percent, out-of-the-box support for multimedia codecs, as well as a bunch of fixes for the most annoying issues reported by users since the previous release of the project.

For example, it is now possible to extend the amount of available free disk space, which many users reported was limited to approximately 200MB, time is now automatically synced and the user does not need to intervene at all, some weird login session freezes have been solved, and various websites should now render properly.

"This is an early build, so we are aware of the fact that there are all kinds of bugs. Many of these have already been addressed in our latest code for which we will release new test builds soon. But feel free to report anything we might not have noticed yet. We are aware of the fact that the performance is not perfect in this build," says Mr. Callahan.

Netflix support is among the top-requested features

Dylan Callahan and his team are working very hard these days to improve the Chromium OS port for Raspberry Pi 2 and add as many features as possible, and among the top-requested ones is support for Netflix and similar DRM-based video streaming services, which should land in upcoming releases.

Lastly, we have the pleasure of informing our readers that they're the first to download the Chromium OS 0.3 for Raspberry Pi 2 release, which they can install on a Class 6 or Class 10 microSDHC card of 2GB or higher capacity. How to install? Start by extracting the img file from the zip archive, then connect the microSD card to your PC, and check to see its location by running the lsblk command.

If you have a single drive on your PC, then the microSD card is located under /dev/sdb. So, in the Terminal app, type "dd -if=image.img --of /dev/sdX" (where "image.img" is the name of the Chromium OS 0.3 for Raspberry Pi 2 image file, and the "/dev/sdX" is the location of the microSD device).