Mark Galassi writes:

So, does anyone here have resources to point me to to answer this question: "what's the best way to run a full GNU/Linux distro on a chromebook?"

I don't have any experience with chromebooks, but my husband has fiddled with several. Here's his take, in case it adds anything to Sam's responses. Dave North writes:

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This was on the Santa Fe LUG list. Do you know if there's a fairly short simple answer to this? I"m under the impression that modern chromebooks are much easier to install Linux on, or maybe you don't even need to because they have it already ...?

...and then...

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1. There is a way to unlock the boot so that you can boot from your debian or ubuntu or fedora USB drive.

This was possible at one time, so depending on how old the machine is, it might work. I'm not up to date for, oh, a few months, but I doubt anything has changed in newer machines.

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2. I've seen someone set up some kind of apt installation on top of chromeOS and get emacs and gnuplot going. It seemed insufficient to get the benefits of all the great utilities.

Depends on the power of the chromebook. You are basically running linux in a virtual machine, and for security purposes, the variant runnin on chrome is somewhat inefficient. On the other hand, even on my old piece o crud chromebook, all the command-line stuff works fine once the machine (eventually) fires up.

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3. I've heard that more recent chromebook models make the #2 type of integration work better.

Yup.

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would there be a resource available that lets you look up which makes and models (HP, Dell, Lenovo, ...) ones are good for that?

Yes. Unfortunately I don't have a url at hand, but it's not that hard to suss out with google.

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So, does anyone here have resources to point me to to answer this question: "what's the best way to run a full GNU/Linux distro on a chromebook?"

Either (a) find an old one that has the ability to change the bootloader or (b) just use the virtual machine they supply and see if it's functional enough.