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.
Resource Links
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”
- Back up any data as the process wipes the system
- Create a restore image for Chrome OS (install the Restore Image Chrome Extension for this task)
- 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
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.
This is the best website so far on this subject. Installed chroot environment a few times this gave best advise.
Install Ubuntu with Crouton
Not sure what you mean. It is using Crouton to install Ubuntu. Your point ?
Thanks so much for this post. I was trying on and off to setup Ubuntu on my Chromebook, but couldn’t figure out why nothing worked. After reading this I realized it was defaulting to Precise.
Your article is the first instruction to specify the version during installation. Thanks so much! Works great!
Is there a really big difference between Unity and XLDE?
Also, do you have a tutorial to setup local applications on a thumbdrive, so I don’t run out of room with onboard memory? Thanks again!