The Samsung Chromebook is a full-sized, ARM-based laptop with 2GB RAM and 16GB flash storage, which costs only $249. A cheap, power-efficient netbook with a big screen? Cool! Now if only there were some way to run a normal operating system on it…

I got Ubuntu installed on my ARM Chromebook tonight. Here’s a messy brain dump of what I did. The system was already in devmode when I started (see http://goo.gl/TSZxs for info on how to achieve that). I also already had a tarball of an Ubuntu filesystem, created with the “rootstock” tool. [edit: you can use the distributed ubuntu-core tarball directly from ubuntu as well, and then install additional packages on top]

Get an SD card, insert it in a reader on your Ubuntu PC…