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Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook
- yuhong 13y agoPersonally, I wish for an ARM notebook market to come out of the Chromebook, with different configurations for Chrome OS and Ubuntu etc.
- 6ren 13y agoI keep being surprised that there is no real ARM netbook (samsung's chromebook and asus transformer come closest). I think the reason is because ARM is significantly less performant than x86. You don't notice it on a phone/tablet, because the stack is optimised (it has to be!) the special-purpose OS, lots of stuff in silicon (esp video), games and (mobile) webpages are written for the platform. But for general computation - e.g. compiling - it's much slower. ARM has optimised power consumption for decades; x86 has optimised performance for decades, so I shouldn't be surprised. PS: doesn't ubuntu have an ARM laptop in the works? (along the lines of their EDGE phone)?
- ZanyProgrammer 13y agoHow about the Surface RT? Even comes with file manager and two command lines.
- rbanffy 13y agoThere's a pool of sarcasm under your post
- k_bx 13y agoIs there a way to press a "super" button on chromebooks?
- broodbucket 13y agoIt's the former "Caps Lock" key
- msoad 13y agoDoes this work for ARM ChromeBooks too?
- 1945 13y agoIs it not possible without "virtualizing" Ubuntu on top of the host OS with crouton?
- broodbucket 13y agoYes it is, Chrubuntu boots directly. http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-script-to-rule-them-all_31.html http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-s...
- rwmj 13y agoLots of other distros work on the Chromebook (and have for longer). Here's for example Fedora 19 and Arch Linux instructions: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes#Samsung_Exynos_5_Dual_Core_Cortex_A15 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes... http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chromebook http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro... 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. Another note about the Chromebook is it is not 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.
- greenido 13y agoAgree... It's on my list to check Fedora.
- pm215 13y agoNo, the firmware doesn't disable Hyp mode; it just starts the kernel in Secure-SVC, rather than in Hyp mode. It's pretty trivial to get from Secure-SVC to Hyp in the bootloader before starting the kernel -- there are u-boot patches floating about which do it. http://www.virtualopensystems.com/media/chromebook/chromebook.pdf http://www.virtualopensystems.com/media/chromebook/chromeboo... is probably a good place to start if you want to tinker. As far as I can tell the main issue with the Chromebook is that there's no one organization who's taking responsibility for making sure fixes and changes like this get upstream, so every distro/person ends up reinventing or locally maintaining patches.
- jlgreco 13y agoYeah, I'm running Debian Wheezy on a Pixel and, besides building my own more current kernels, there is nothing special going on here.
- rwmj 13y agoHowever the Pixel has an Intel chip doesn't it?
- avian 13y agoAll 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 on each boot. In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop. 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. 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)
- rwmj 13y agoAgree with all your points. On the other hand, these are cheap, widely available A15 devices with a reasonable amount of RAM, and that has a certain appeal for people who need ARM-based developer machines (we used them for porting Fedora, KVM, libvirt, libguestfs and the virt tools to ARM). Also I used one for 2+ weeks exclusively (running Fedora 18) and it wasn't that bad: http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-after-2-5-weeks-with-the-samsung-chromebook/#content http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-after-2-5...
- jdn 13y agoThe developer mode warning only occurs on boot, as you say. Having owned by the ARM Chromebook and the Pixel since both were released, I've probably seen that warning less than 8 times since install. The Chromebooks very rarely need to be turned off, and the one time that does happen often, on update restarts, actually bypasses that warning.
- avian 13y agoIt really depends what you want to do. If you just run a chroot inside the stock ChromeOS then what you say is true. But if you're dual-booting to another Linux distribution or just replace ChromeOS altogether (that's another issue with the linked article: what it describes is not a dual-boot) you can't escape frequent reboots. Especially due to flaky suspend/sleep mode support in other distros.
- _mc 13y agoRunning X on Y! Man, I am telling you no one is happy with what they have ;-)
- rbanffy 13y agoCould be worse - you can't to that on a Surface RT.
- sbuccini 13y agoI 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?
- kyberias 13y agoBuild them.
- Nursie 13y agoWhat programs? If you're trying x86/wine then forget it. But the usual suspects are available from the ubuntu repos just fine.
- sbuccini 13y agoAh, okay. I'm wondering if I should ditch this one and pick up an Intel-based Chromebook instead. I actually just need a cheap solution to program in this year, and I'd love to step away from Windows and start using Linux (since OS X is outside of my price point). Any suggestions?
- Nursie 13y agoFar as I'm concerned you can do pretty much anything FOSS, so it's a perfectly good platform for linux development.
- petroica 13y agoTried 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. http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-script-to-rule-them-all_31.html http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-scri...
- srik 13y agoThings seem better now. I remember bricking the original beta google chromebook that google gave out for testing because of following murky instructions.
- caiob 13y agoThis makes me wonder, despite pricing, what are the reasons to buy a chromebook instead of any other laptop on the market?
- Nursie 13y agoMe, I have a long running ARM fetish ever since debian-ising my NSLU2 back in the day. Also for some sick reason I like to repurpose stuff. All that said - it turns out ChromeOS with developer access enabled (so I can get a proper shell and a normal ssh client) covers about 80% of my needs in a client machine.
- Nursie 13y agoHave 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.
- sethammons 13y agoFinally was motivated to try this out. Totally happy. Honestly, all I really wanted was python and a nice shell, but having a full OS is great.