Every time my paycheck is direct-deposited, I contemplate purchasing a Chromebook. Long gone are the days of the CR-48 laptops with the clunky interface and frustrating usability. Although I never quite seem to pull the trigger and buy a Chromebook, thanks to the developer Hexxeh, it's possible to run the Chromium OS on a wide variety of hardware combinations. I'm writing this on my Dell Latitude D420 booted into Hexxeh's Vanilla build of Chromium. (I'm using the excellent Chrome App Writebox as an editor.) You can get the most recent build of Vanilla from Hexxeh's Web site: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net.

Image from http://hexxeh.net

The exciting news, however, has nothing to do with laptops at all. Like most Linux-based pseudo-embedded projects, Hexxeh's Chromium build is getting ported to the Raspberry Pi. Once complete, a Chromium-enabled Raspberry Pi desktop machine will be a very affordable, power-sipping alternative to Google's ChromeBox units. Projects like this really beg the question: is there anything the Raspberry Pi can't do? For more details on the Pi port, visit Hexxeh's blog: http://hexxeh.net.