Turning a Chromebook into a full-fledged working laptop

I think many have heard about Hrombuki, laptops from Google with ChomeOS preinstalled, but few use them because of the limited ChromeOS. Who needs a laptop with only one browser?

Today I want to talk about how you can “pump” Hrombuk to almost a full-fledged laptop based on Linux. At once I will make a reservation that this is not an instruction how to format the bootloader and install Ubuntu with the main system. There is something more interesting that will allow you to keep two operating systems on the Hrombuk and easily switch between them using the key combination.
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Interesting? Then welcome under cat.

Crouton , a set of scripts prepared by a Google employee that creates a chroot environment inside ChromeOS, will help us achieve what we want. Using this chroot environment, you can install one of several Linux distributions supported (Ubuntu, Debian) and run it in parallel with ChromeOS. Thus, you get access to two different operating systems that are running at the same time, and you do not have to reboot to go from one system to another.

So, first you will need to activate Developer mode on your Hrombuka. To do this, hold down the ESC and Refresh keys and then press the Power button. You will see the Recovery screen , in which you will have to press the Ctrl + D combination. Your Chromebook will go to Developer mode , and all data stored on it will be deleted (do not forget to backup in advance if you have something to lose).


Now with each download you will see such a screen. This is a warning that Hrombuk is in developer mode and the Operating System check is disabled. Unfortunately, these messages can not be removed or hidden. Press Ctrl + D to continue the download.

Once downloaded to ChromeOS, you’ll need to download the Crouton script package itself, and then launch it. To do this, launch the console with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T and type the shell in the console (this command works only in developer mode and allows you to access the ChromeOS shell). After that, run crouton with the following command:

sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r raring -t unity

This command will install Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) along with the Unity Desktop Environment. Instead of Unity, you can put xfce, KDE or Cinnamon. A full list of supported window managers along with other extensions can be found here , or by running the command:

sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t help

By default, the script installs Ubuntu 12.10, but you can specify a different distribution using the -r parameter. To get a complete list of supported distributives, run:

sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r list

After the installation is completed, you can go to the chroot environment by running the sudo startunity command (the startunity may differ and depends on the settings you chose during the installation. The exact command will be listed in the console at the end of the installation).


Now you can switch between the two systems using the Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Back and Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Forward keys. Both systems will be started simultaneously and switching will not take more than a second.

I have been using a Chromebook for about six months and thanks to this method I have made it my main work computer. I spend some time in ChromeOS and thanks to Nitrous.io I write code using WebIDE, and when I need something that is not in ChromeOS, I switch to Ubuntu. I have Skype, Filezilla, Sublime, Android Studio, Ruby + Rails, Sass installed on it.

Summing up, I want to say that using Crouton, you can make full-value working laptops from relatively inexpensive Khrombukov. I hope this information will be useful to someone and will allow to see laptops from Google in a new light.