Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook
greenido.wordpress.com
greenido.wordpress.com
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)
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...
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.
On my Chromebook, it boots as soon as you open the lid, and so I press Ctrl-D instead of the "On" button. I thought it'd be a pain, but it doesn't bother me at all, and you say that makes it "practically useless"?
I do mind having to do them each and every time I pick up the computer, especially when I have bought it believing that I won't have to.
(The infuriating bit is how difficult it is to enter developer mode: two very secret keypresses and a thirty-second "please reconsider" grace period.)
Source: The article you're commenting on
It turns on and off as normal after installation, you just need to hit Ctrl-L mid-boot each time. I reboot infrequently enough that this hasn't annoyed me yet.
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.
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.
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-scri...
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-s...
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)?
If you're trying x86/wine then forget it. But the usual suspects are available from the ubuntu repos just fine.
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?
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.