Only 11 months after its official presentation, rumor has it that the first final version of Chromium OS (also known as Chrome OS) will be launched next month. The news was unveiled by TechCrunch, after spotting references to the project reaching the Release Candidate development stage - usually the final debugging and beta-testing phase, right before the official final release.

According to these references, included in bug comments on the Google Code site, Chromium's most recent build is 0.9.78.1, so we can expect the first final version of Google's operating system as soon as that version hits "1".

There are several possible dates for this release. Some blogs bet on November 11th, mainly due to a Google employee mentioning this date in a thread over at Google Code site. 'We will push this after November 11', he replies to a request about a certain feature. Another possible release date, on the other hand, would be November 19th - the first anniversary of their presentation event last year.

Whatever the final launch date is, Google Chromium OS will be one of the most important software events of the year, and I'm sure the hype will keep on growing until we can finally lay our hands on it.