Today the long-awaited guide on how to convert an Acer C710 Chromebook into a full Linux laptop has been posted here. It borrows and coalesces and condenses from some other guides into a single, one-stop-shop for conversion with page links for in-depth references.

The short version is that you’ll need:

  • an Acer C710
  • a USB thumbstick
  • 4/8GB of RAM
  • an Internet connection (wired/wireless)
  • a larger SSD (or hard drive, I suppose)
  • About an hour or two of total time
  • About thirty minutes of time for work

As of this writing this Chromebook is fully supported by Ubuntu 13.10+ and works marvellously with a decent battery life. Total cost of the project was about $350 ($200 for the Chromebook, $100 for the 120GB SSD and $50 for the memory sticks). For additional fun you can still leave ChromeOS installed in a very small partition so if you get tired of Linux you can easily flip back to ChromeOS. Happy hacking!