Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Chromebook
YOU’LL NEED THIS
RASPBERRY PI 3, 4, OR 400 A MicroSD card 4GB or greater.
THE BEAUTY of single-board computers is that they can be switched between operating systems easily—it’s just a case of swapping a microSD card over and switching it back on. The operating systems are easy to install too, flashed to a card from your PC with a user-friendly piece of software.
Recently, we showed you how you can use a full 64-bit operating system—Ubuntu—on a Raspberry Pi, and get real work done on a diminutive PC. This time, we’re going to do the same thing, but to the opposite extreme. Chromium OS—an open-source version of the Chromebook OS—is as minimal as things come without being a command line, as it’s just the Chrome browser. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly limited. There’s a full office suite in there, cloud storage, image editors, e-book readers, and all sorts of other apps that are available as web apps. With no flashy interfaces or 3D games to distract you, working like this is a low-powered way to get everyday computing tasks done.
It’s also quite responsive, which isn’t something you can say for some of the heavier operating systems available for the Pi. We’re using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM here, but it will also run on a Pi 400, 3B or 3B+ model.