But, as you know, I can’t just leave well enough alone. There is so much hardware performance prowess here that begs for me to tap into it. Naturally the 2nd thing I had to do was install Linux so I can do all the things I can’t do in Chome, namely run Steam and ultimately play Dota2. YES!

Everything that follows is NOT supported by Dell nor Google, will probably void your warranty and may cause your precious Chromebook to burst into flames (not really). Anything bad that happens to you will not be my fault. I’m documenting this for my own selfish intentions of information preservation. Proceed at your own risk or peril!

ChromeOS is powered via a Linux kernel so outfitting to work with a separate Linux distro is not a terribly difficult task and frankly a match made in heaven. 32GB is plenty of room to run a minimal Linux instance and your choice of desktop plus a game title or two. There are a couple of ways to go here but one of the easiest and most popular is using crouton which is ultimately a chroot generator for ChromeOS. Crouton provides the ability to run Ubuntu on the Chromebook leveraging the existing ChromeOS kernel so you can leave your existing ChromeOS instance in place.

Normally, you would be able to switch back and forth between the operating environments real-time so you get the best of both worlds here, but this appears to be broken for me at the moment. I can play in one environment or the other, no biggie. The following are the steps I took to create a Linux environment on my Chromebook so I could run Steam and play Dota.

Create ChromeOS Recovery Disk

As is always the best practice, take a backup of your perfectly working Chromebook before you make any changes. To do this, first install the Chromebook Recovery Utility on the Chromebook. Insert a USB stick that is 4GB or larger, follow the prompts. Easy peasy.

Enable Developer Mode

The first step on our journey is to enable developer mode. This removes the security of OS verification and will warn you every time the device is restarted. To enable this mode hold down ESC and Refresh keys then tap the power button to enter recovery. Once there you will see this somewhat scary and currently inaccurate screen:

Press Ctrl + D to enter developer mode, confirm then reboot. This operation will wipe your device so plan accordingly! Once complete you will see the following screen initially at every reboot which can be bypassed with Ctrl+D or you can wait for it to time out.

Once the system comes back up, go through the initial setup process again to get into Chrome and connected to the network.

Install Crouton

From Chrome, Grab the latest crouton file: https://goo.gl/fd3zc and save to the Downloads folder.

In Chrome, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a crosh terminal tab within the browser. Type “shell” to enter the Linux shell mode:

Next, install crouton by executing:

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

If this fails due to a lack of permissions, then execute the following to first gain root:

sudo su 

Run the command again without sudo and point to the crouton file within your user profile. Keep in mind that you’ll be running as root now and “~Downloads” will not have your crouton file. You will need to navigate to or point sh at this specific directory so the command will execute correctly. In this example the required command would be: