So you’re one of the 60,000 or so people who managed to get your hands on one of Google’s newfangled Chrome OS notebooks, but it turns out you’re not all that enamored with the Chrome Operating System. No worries. The Cr-48 turns out to be a nifty little 12 inch notebook with a nice big keyboard, a 1280 x 800 pixel display, and an Intel Atom processor, which means it’s perfectly capable of running other operating systems.

Some hackers have even put together a pretty good tutorial for dual booting Chrome OS and Ubuntu Linux on the Cr-48.

The process is a little tricky, especially if you don’t have experience working with Linux file systems, but once you’re done you can run a fully functional desktop operating system on the Cr-48, complete with the ability to download and install apps on your local disk, without removing Chrome OS  — which means you can still use the notebook as Google intended.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from just wiping Chrome OS altogether and installing an alternate OS on your free laptop. But where’s the fun in that?

via Download Squad

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7 replies on “How to install Ubuntu Linux on Google’s Cr-48 Chrome notebook”

  1. The only thing I like about the CR-48 is the battery life. The OS sucks. I’m going to put Ubuntu on it and stop wasting my time. I can’t even get it to boot enough to give Google feedback.

  2. although i won’t try it on my cr-48 it’s very cool to see that theres other people out there that are gutsy in doing something like this. keep up the good work, maybe later someone will boot OS X on it, that’d be amazing. for now, i am enjoying the LONG battery life and the Chrome operating system.

    1. Me too,I love this thing. I pulled it out of the box with 56% battery,played around with it for probably about 4 hours,put it to sleep and plugged it in,had dinner,picked it up probably about an hour later,it was back at 59%,I used it for about an hour then plugged it in and I’ve been using it plugged in for about an hour now and its up to 91%. my old laptop was nowhere close to this awesome battery life. one thing to note,hulu does not like this thing. it looks like a slideshow in fullscreen,and it plays smoothly in windowed mode,but the fan goes crazy,thats the only time I’ve had the fan turn on.

  3. This is a shame, the people who received the netbook have agreed to test chrome as their main OS for a few months. Installing something else and screwing the test is simply poor behavior

    1. yea, bad, bad boys ….
      seriously this only shows, that this security and bullet proof stuff of chrome os is – well bullshit. as long as google does not use a really newly (from scratch) developed os it seems fairly easy to tamper with it. that’s the message

      1. Not really, this is just a dual boot, so chrome is unmodified. Or just swiping it, as suggested above. The problem is with some testers being deceptive and not holding their side of the deal.

        Needless to say, it’ll be totally fine to do this on hardware that you bought (whenever these beauties go on sale).

        Cheers!

    2. I cant get the wifi to stay up. Every 15min I have to restart the computer. No answers anywhere. Three months of this so far. What would you do?

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