Install Ubuntu 14.04 on a Chromebook

By Leo Gaggl

There are plenty of sites out there that give advise on this topic, unfortunately most of them are highly ad-infested to the point of being unreadable as well as only containing single bit rather that an overall picture. This is a collection of useful links to source materials as well as steps necessary to install.

Crouton Github: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton – Thank you David Schneider for the excellent work !!!
Developer Info for Chromebooks: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices

Put Cromebook into “developer mode”

  1. Back up any data as the process wipes the system
  2. Create a restore image for Chrome OS (install the Restore Image Chrome Extension for this task)
  3. Enter Developer Mode – hold down ESC and Refresh (F3) keys and press the Power button

Download Crouton Script

Download link for installer: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dnschneid/crouton/master/installer/crouton

Installing Crouton

CTRL+Alt+t to open Cronos Prompt + type “shell” to enter proper bash shell.

To see the list of supported releases:
sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r list
To see a list of the supported desktop envoironments (target names):
sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t help
I generally install LXDE on ‘resource-challenged’ devices.

shell<br></br>sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r RELEASENAME -t TARGETNAME -e

The ‘-e’ at the end is optional to encrypt the chroot. Which is probably a good idea as the Chromebook in developer mode is completely open and allows any user to access. If you do not specify the Release it defaults to Ubuntu 12.04 (precise)

My default install would be:
sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t lxde -e

Removing Crouton

The proper way to remove the chroot environment created by Crouton is as follows

sudo delete-chroot CHROOTNAME

CHROOTNAME could be ‘precise’ or ‘trusty’ depending on the installed version and can be found by

ls /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/

Run Ubuntu

Depending on your installed shell.
sudo startlxde

Replace with ‘startxfce4’ or ‘startkde’ or ‘startunity’ depending on your target release.