Chromebooks can now run Linux without dual-booting via Crouton (ChRomium Os Universal chrooT envirONment)! A big advantage of Crouton is that users don’t have to reboot their machine to switch operating systems. Moving to Linux can be as simple as using a keyboard shortcut. Crouton can be downloaded from github ().
Crouton is a set of scripts that act as an easy-to-use, Chromium OS-centric chroot generator that current supports Ubuntu and Debian distributions. It offers various desktop environments including Xfce, Unity, and KDE. (Unity appears to be too heavy for most chromebooks.)
The Crouton github page has good instructions on the wiki.
Note: You need a device running Chromium OS that has been switched to developer mode.
- For instructions on how to do that, go to this Chromium OS wiki page, click on your device model and follow the steps in the Entering Developer Mode section.
- Note that developer mode, in its default configuration, is completely insecure, so don’t expect a password in your chroot to keep anyone from your data. Crouton does support encrypting chroots, but the encryption is only as strong as the quality of your passphrase. Consider this your warning.
- It’s also highly recommended that you install the crouton extension, which, when combined with the
extensionorxiwitargets, provides much improved integration with Chromium OS.
Following is a video tutorial series:
Intel:
ARM:
Go crazy and run Windows applications on your Chromebook using Wine:
How about Skype?
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