Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

yuhong wrote: post #2

Personally, I wish for an ARM notebook market to come out of the Chromebook, with different configurations for Chrome OS and Ubuntu etc.

I 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)?

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#6

Post by jdn » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 9:51 AM UTC

msoad wrote: post #4

Does this work for ARM ChromeBooks too?

Yep, Crouton was originally made for the ARM Chromebook from what I understand.

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#7

Post by 1945 » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 9:52 AM UTC

Is it not possible without "virtualizing" Ubuntu on top of the host OS with crouton?

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#8

Post by broodbucket » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 10:14 AM UTC

k_bx wrote: post #3

Is there a way to press a "super" button on chromebooks?

It's the former "Caps Lock" key

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#9

Post by broodbucket » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 10:17 AM UTC

1945 wrote: post #7

Is it not possible without "virtualizing" Ubuntu on top of the host OS with crouton?

Yes it is, Chrubuntu boots directly.

http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-s...

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#10

Post by rwmj » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 10:32 AM UTC

Lots 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... 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.