Two of the most ubiquity tools used when installing custom ROMs are adb and fastboot which belong to the Android SDK. They are available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Although they are statically linked binaries, they are 32-bit only. I use ChromeOS nowadays, and latest incarnations of ChromeOS run a 64-bit Linux inside. Moreover, ChromeOS doesn’t include any 32-bit library support by default.

So, how can one run adb or fastboot directly from ChromeOS? A method I found consists of enabling ChromeOS Developer Mode, and from there, using Crouton to install a minimal Ubuntu Linux running inside a chroot. Having a working, minimal Ubuntu installed alongside ChromeOS means that I can install ia32-libs in order to be able to run Android’s adb and fastboot unmodified.

Finally, install adb and fastboot inside the chroot. Or alternatively, download adb and fastboot outside the chroot and copy them into your chroot environment. My only, default chroot, is installed in /usr/local/chroots/precise.