All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning <i>on each boot</i>. In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop.<p>You can flash the first stage bootloader to remove that warning, but that is not documented well (if you can call several contradictory forum threads documentation), involves taking the laptop apart and gives you exactly one try: it either works or bricks the device permanently.<p>In addition to that, at least Samsung's Chromebooks are not very well designed and can be seriously damaged from userspace when running a general-purpose distribution (Google for burning speakers on ARM Chromebook for instance)
Lots of other distros work on the Chromebook (and have for longer). Here's for example Fedora 19 and Arch Linux instructions:<p><a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes#Samsung_Exynos_5_Dual_Core_Cortex_A15" rel="nofollow">https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes...</a>
<a href="http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chromebook" rel="nofollow">http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro...</a><p>The next challenge is getting KVM working. The Chromebook has an A15 chip which has hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately the firmware disables HYP mode, but the Xen guys managed to workaround this in their bootloader so it should be possible for KVM too.<p>Another note about the Chromebook is it is <i>not</i> possible to boot it from an external hard drive. You have to boot it from USB flash although after boot you can of course use a real hard drive as the root filesystem.
Tried Crouton on my Acer C7 Chromebook a few months back, and it was buggy as hell. Switched to the Chrubuntu script, and it's been a dream. I'm surprised it's not mentioned at all.<p><a href="http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-script-to-rule-them-all_31.html" rel="nofollow">http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-scri...</a>
Have had Ubuntu on my ARM chromebook since late last year. Only issue so far is that the version of Slim dm that is available for it from the 12.04 repos is b0rked and doesn't speak to consolekit properly, resulting in all sorts of hard to diagnose fun with reboot and other permissions.
I just did this last night on my Samsung Chromebook. One problem I immediately ran into was the difficulty of getting programs to run in Ubuntu because of my ARM processor. Any suggestions?
Things seem better now. I remember bricking the original beta google chromebook that google gave out for testing because of following murky instructions.