I run Ubuntu on mine.

I haven't tried running Eclipse. Oracle recently released an Early Access version of Java 8 with hardfp support to cash in on the Raspberry Pi fever, presumably that build would work on the ARM/Chromebook running Ubuntu (though it wouldn't be totally optimized for it) but I haven't tried it to be sure.

If I were doing Android development on this system I'd probably stick with ant based builds and use emacs or gedit (I wish Sublime Text 2 had an ARM build, the fact that it doesn't is kind of killing it as a useful editor for me these days). Eclipse is already a bit slower than I would like on my desktop, I'd imagine using it wouldn't be that great on the Chromebook.

Check this link out: http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/arm-chrubuntu-12...

Even if possible, for me I think this setup would be a very painful experience with a slower CPU, low resolution display, and only 2GB RAM compared to what at least I'm used to, which is a Dell M4500 i7 with 8GB RAM, granted it did cost five times as much a couple of years back.

If he ditched eclipse, it could actually work. Developing Android apps with Emacs and the command line tools is really quite feasible, especially since there's no enterprise shit-ola which is what people rely heavily on IDEs to generate for them.

But I don't think the Android SDK is available in anything but x86... so, maybe if he used qemu emulation?

I'm running ubuntu on my ARM Chromebook; it runs well. (Or at lesst, better than an atom will)

I've always been interested in having a cheap, replaceable and portable laptop like this as a dev machine, but the more I think about it the more I realize this is more like an iPad (i.e. for media consumption) than a dev machine. That is until we have some solid browser-based "cloud" IDE's.

Chromebooks make excellent portable SSH terminals (see [0]) thanks to having decent keyboards (esp. for the price range) and great battery life. http://c9.io shows some promise as well, though IMHO it still doesn't beat good old-fashioned tmux.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

If you spend any time at all without net connectivity, you need to be able to work with native tools on a cloned code repo. The machine is more than powerful enough for plenty of local dev tasks, it's really a shame you can't work locally.

Is there any indication that they'll ever add windowed (not full-screen) X-forwarding?

When I'm working from afar, ssh with tunneled X is all I need.