software development under chromeOS?

Solution 1:

Desktop environments like Eclipse will only be available through remote desktop/VNC/Citrix apps (to another actual/virtualized desktop). For the "pure" Chrome OS experience, you'll need to use new cloud-based development sites/apps like Kodingen. With basic offline capability, you'll be able to edit code and maybe manage your project without live connectivity, but not compile it -- until someone writes compilers in JavaScript or something. Perhaps Google's NaCl will fill that gap.

The current Cr-48 prototype lets you drop into a (custom, not bash) shell. You can do some work there, but I have not heard whether and how a shell will be available on the final consumer units, and how Google might try to mandate what is or is not there. Regardless, if you can get full root access, you can install whatever you want on top of the Linux base; but I would not consider that to be "Chrome OS" any more.

Solution 2:

a pretty accurate list of packages chrome has out of the box can be found here: http://virtguru.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/12minutes-chromium-os-internals-installed-packages-and-their-sizes-on-defaut-devel-image/

it's just a JeOS customization so ultimately you should be able to put pretty much any linux package on it imo. i don't see a jre out of the box for eclipse, but vim and bash are both there.