One great thing about the Chromebook, is the
Crouton application / script.
Here's what I did to run a Linux distro in top of my Chromebook - without touching the Chromium OS itself.
Install
First, find out how to get into developer mode. My documentation was to be found
here, so:
To invoke Recovery mode, you hold down the
ESC
and
Refresh
(F3) keys and press the
Power
button.
To enter Dev-mode, you first invoke Recovery, and at the Recovery screen press
Ctrl-D
(there's no prompt - you have to know to do it). It will ask you to confirm, then reboot into dev-mode.
Next, I followed the
Crouton readme, downloaded the script itself into /Downloads. I (almost) followed the easy way
The easy way (assuming you want an Ubuntu LTS with Xfce)
Download
crouton
Open a shell (Ctrl+Alt+T, type
shell
and hit enter) and run
sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce
Wait patiently and answer the prompts like a good person.
Done! You can jump straight to your Xfce session by running
sudo enter-chroot startxfce4
or, as a special shortcut,
sudo startxfce4
Cycle through Chromium OS and your running graphical chroots using Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Back and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Forward.
Exit the chroot by logging out of Xfce.
except I used:
sudo
sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce,xfce-desktop,gtk-extra,extension,xiwi
which also added the integration with the Crouton integration extension for Chrome. Then a
sudo startxfce4
started me into Ubuntu with the XFCE window manager, in full screen but I could return to the Chrome OS and also choose to see Ubuntu running it its own window.
You can add new 'targets' (features basically) to an existing chroot by using the -u switch:
sudo
sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce,xfce-desktop,gtk-extra,extension,xiwi -u
I could then configure the Ubuntu system, add packages with Synaptic, and so on. And performance was fast - GIMP with additional plugins and filters loads in a few seconds.
And if it all goes wrong:
sudo delete-chroot precise
will completely wipe it so you can begin the install again, where 'precise' was the name of my default chroot (ubuntu).