Here are five steps you can take to setup a comfortable development environment on your Chromebook. These tips can be found in numerous places online.
So far, using the Samsung ARM Chromebook has been pretty flippin' sweet. I'm just waiting for ARM support for ghci!
- Enable Developer Mode
Follow the instructions here.
- Install a
chrooted Ubuntu with crouton
Use crouton to install Ubuntu in a chroot. This gives you access to the breadth of packages available on Ubuntu (just sudo apt-get install $package) and makes your Chromebook a viable development environment. Just sudo enter-chroot in crosh to access your Ubuntu install.
You can also launch XFCE this way and switch fluidly between XFCE and Chrome OS, but I've found I only need shell access.
- Fix Terminal Colors
Crosh supports 256 colors, but defaults to 8. You can fix this by adding export TERM=xterm-256color to your ~/.bashrc in Ubuntu. This will give you nice, colorful vim sessions.
- Install Crosh Window
This gives you two things: a nice app icon you can pin in your launcher, as well as a crosh window without the browser chrome.
Crosh Window relies on Secure Shell (I have no idea why). Note that Secure Shell does not currently work on ARM (because of NaCl issues?), but this won't affect Crosh Window.
- Autohide Launcher
Why not reclaim some screen real estate? Right-click the launcher and enable "Autohide launcher".
Regarding GHCi...