Folks, we've been running various distros in chroots on chromebooks (just google 'google chromebook' :-). Note this means you don't need a kernel, or drivers, or wifi, or whatever: just userland.
Some use ubuntu:
https://github.com/dnschneid/croutonSome use Arch:
http://goo.gl/Ry0kxbut in all cases, these installs make substantive changes to the chromebook 'stateful' partition, because they install lots of files related to the packages, which for various reasons would best be avoided.
I've built a distro around tinycore in the past that became a tinycore package (
https://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/thread/afaf6058225b88bd) and am a fan.
I think that the tinycore package model is almost ideal for a chromebook. My goal would be to have a script that takes part of the boot path each time the chroot is set up, such that the packages are in essence loaded anew each time, as in the tinycore model. Then, the only really persistent state would be the user files and the list of packages the user needs (which could be stored in ... the user's files). We'd be kind of running in the 'cloud' model, I guess. Also, the mount-squashfs-on-loopback tinycore model is ideal for chromebooks, which have less storage than people are used to (16 GB on the ARM, for example). In the longer term, the user files would be backed to a cloud store.
I'm a bit unsure on how to set this script up. We're not going to boot, we just want to do the part that sets up the packages. Before I waste a lot of time doing it wrong, I was wondering if anyone here had suggestions on how to do it right ... comments welcome. I have a feeling this is simple, but wanted to make sure. My current script for arch does something like this
unshare /bin/bash
set up bind mounts for /dev, /proc, etc.
Do squashfs mounts to instantiate packages
run the chroot
# once chroot exits, bind mounts disappear since we did them in a new namespace.
It's that 'run the setup' part that I hope to work out. I assume it's just a bunch of mounts, but is there more?
Thanks again for tinycore linux!
ron