The most popular version entitled "
Chromium OS Flow" was created by Liam McLoughlin, a then 17-year-old college student in Manchester, England, posting under the name "Hexxeh". McLoughlin's builds boot from a USB memory stick and included features that Google engineers had not yet implemented, such as support for the Java programming language.[8]
While Google did not expect that hobbyists would use and evaluate Chromium OS ahead of its official release, Sundar Pichai, Google vice president of product management, said that "what people like Hexxeh are doing is amazing to see." Pichai said the early releases were an unintended consequence of open source development. "If you decide to do open-source projects, you have to be open all the way."[8]
Hexxeh's work continued into the following year. He announced "Chromium OS Lime" in December 2010,[9] and in January 2011, released "Luigi", an application designed to "jalbreak" the Google Cr-48 "Mario" prototype hardware and install a generic BIOS.[10] The developer made the builds available in virtual machine format on March 13, 2011, the date of his most recent blog posting.[11] With no official build of Chromium OS forthcoming from Google,
Hexxeh's "Vanilla" nightly builds of Chromium OS remain the principal resource for people wanting to try Chromium OS.