I recently purchased a Chromebook 13 (cb5-311, 4GB RAM, 1080p, 32G SSD) and
I've managed to get Ubuntu on it.
I tried a bunch of different chrubuntu install scripts and eventually
discovered that none of them worked using default settings because they try to
install 14.10 and that's broken.
I eventually settled on this script:
https://github.com/marcino239/chrubuntu-tegra/blob/master/chrubuntu-tegra.sh
To make it work, I opened the script up and hardcoded the ubuntu_version
variable's default value to "lts" so it would pick 14.04 instead of whatever
the latest was. I also changed the argument to umount the statefule_partition
with -l instead of -f, but I don't know if that was necessary, I just didn't
want another script to bomb out and have to start over. I may also have put in
a touch /etc/init/whoopsie for similar reasons, but I don't recall now.
To get around the freeze due to uap0/mlan0 I did something like
echo manual | sudo tee /etc/init/network-manager.override
This disabled network manager. I just bring the mlan0 interface up manually
when I want it. Later I'll probably script it.
Then I installed fvwm and generally set about customizing things. To make up
for a lack of insert key, I made the Enter key become insert when the right alt
button is held down. To do that, I put this in .xmodmaprc:
keysym Alt_R = Mode_switch
keycode 36 = Return NoSymbol Insert
So now I can use shift insert to paste by hitting alt+shift+enter. (Order
matters).
I made a udev rule for setting permissions on the backlight so I can control
that with a script, too. /etc/udev/rules.d/88-backlight.rules now contains
these lines:
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="pwm-backlight", SUBSYSTEM=="backlight", RUN+="/bin/chmod 0666 /sys/devices/soc0/pwm-backlight/backlight/pwm-backlight/brightness"
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="pwm-backlight", SUBSYSTEM=="backlight", RUN+="/bin/chgrp users /sys/devices/soc0/pwm-backlight/backlight/pwm-backlight/brightness"
I guess you can't use use GROUP and MODE to set permissions on /sys entries,
but you can use RUN to do it.
I cannot put the laptop to sleep and closing the lid does nothing, but it boots fast and can go around 12 hours before I have to recharge. There might be other things that don't quite work, but I either don't recall or I haven't encountered them yet.