The last few weeks have seen the fan-fair of the final unveiling of the long awaited Chrome OS beta program. Over 14,000  CR-48 Chrome Notebooks have been shipped thus far and an estimated 46,000 are still to come. Even-so, amid all this excitement independent developers are working hard to keep the Chromium OS project going. One such developer who we’ve come to know as ‘Hexxeh‘ isn’t sitting on his laurels; he’s hard at work on what will be Chromium OS Lime, the successor to Chromium OS Flow.

In a recent blog post, Hexxeh explained exactly what he’s working on:

ChromiumOS Lime is the successor to ChromiumOS Flow, and brings together the bleeding edge freshness of a Vanilla build and the expanded hardware support you’re used to in a Flow build. I know lots of you have been asking for an update to Flow, and I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long. So here’s the good news. I’m aiming to release Lime within the next two weeks. It will ship with Lime AU as part of the image, but the servers will not be live at launch. The goal is to release within two weeks, but I’m not making any guarantee that it will be available within two weeks.

He goes on to explain how you could be part of his beta testing program to ensure that Chromium OS Lime is compatible with a large enough selection of hardware:

However, we’ll be starting limited betas so that I can test on hardware I don’t own in the next week or so. If you’d like to be a part of this, then make sure you’re in the IRC channel (##hexxeh on irc.freenode.org). You can also watch the status of the builders in there, and get notified when a new Vanilla build is completed.

We’ll keep you informed on any new developments during the next few weeks. It’s no secret that a lot of people have been waiting for an update to Chromium OS flow. In the meantime, read our interview with Hexxeh and find out his thoughts about the Chrome OS Beta and his first impressions of the CR-48 Chrome Notebook.