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Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, and examples are licensed under the BSD License.

The Chromium OS designs and code are preliminary. Expect them to evolve.
Chromium OS‎ > ‎

Getting and Building a Chromium-Based OS

Contents

  1. 1 Prerequisites
  2. 2 Get the source
  3. 3 Build Chromium OS
  4. 4 Make changes
  5. 5 More information
Welcome to Chromium OS!

Our goal here is to give you an idea of how to get started.

Note: For all instructions, make sure you download the client into a local directory. Placing the source and compiling on a network partition will drive you nuts. 

Note: These build instructions will evolve over time as the build system is improved. Make sure to periodically check back for the latest information.

Prerequisites

You need to have Linux. We currently support the following:
  • Ubuntu (Hardy 8.04 or newer, Karmic 9.10 recommended)
  • A 64-bit system for performing the build (we hope to support 32-bit machines as well at some point)
  • An account with root access (needed to run chroot and modify the mount table)
  • Chromium prerequisites (needed to build a Chromium-based browser as part of building Chromium OS)

Get the source

At this stage, you will need to get the Chromium OS source code. Follow the instructions in Getting the Chromium OS Source Code.  

Build Chromium OS

Follow the Build Instructions. 

This document describes how to build the Chromium OS image. This also includes steps for building the Chromium-based browser for use with Chromium OS.

Make changes

Note:  If you would like to make changes to Chromium OS, you must have used Git to download the source.  

Now that you have gotten and built the Chromium OS image, let's talk about making changes to the Chromium OS code base.

More information

We use Git to manage the Chromium OS repository. To learn about Git, read Git Help.

Here are some tips on installing and using a debugger to help you with debugging programs in Chromium OS.

The Developer FAQ can help you with common development problems.