Google’s Chromium team is making it easier to modify the software stack of your Chromebook, boot a Linux distribution from a USB drive, and carry out other tasks.
It’s long been possible to load custom Linux distributions on x86 and ARM Chromebooks by carrying out a variety of steps and using third-party scripts, but Chromium developers are looking to improve the workflow and make it even easier.
The team at Google is making it easy to enable debugging features when the device is booted in the developer mode. When enabling the debugging features from its new UI, the root file-system verification is skipped to allow modifying OS files, SSH support is enabled, booting from USB is enabled, and the root log-in password can be set.
For Chromebook users interested in more information, the debugging features UI landed and there’s many more details on this Google+ page of François Beaufort, one of the Google employees that’s part of the Chromium team.