Jay Freeman successfully ports Debian for Android

[CJ Chitwood]

And seriously, why would you WANT to run GIMP on this tiny-a**ed screen? With this screen, I have to be real careful where I place my finger on the tiny links in browser to be sure I get the right one... GIMP would be completely useless... I'd spend 3/4 of my time hitting "undo" from the edit menu (since there's no CTRL key for the Z).

After reading the source article, it appears that Debian and Android would be running side-by-side.... I'm not sure I understand what they're doing there.... is it merely chrooted?

I agree, there's more likelihood (and benefit) of porting Android to desktop than Linux to handheld, but that's not the point. We learn by doing. We may not get anything useful out of *this* but who knows what we might learn by doing this that we may use elsewhere?

I applaud the effort, myself, but I don't plan on trying it until I see that Debian has apps to turn my newly rewritten cellphone BACK INTO a cellphone so I can continue using the PHONE in it.




However...


What would be FAR more useful to me is (1) root access, even if I DON'T ever use it, and (2) the ability to edit my screen to do different icons, different text fonts, etc.



Now, I guess I'm gonna hafta go google Amarok and Compiz to see what these are... I keep reading posts about them like they're some kind of Cocaine for nerds but I've never really paid them any attention...

[CJ Chitwood]

WOW!!! Compiz on a G1??? Never gonna happen! Not smoothly, anyway...


Check it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w#



They'll have to do some SERIOUS squeezing to fit all THAT in our box... but it sure is pretty!


*drool*

Wait... I have a 64-bit AMD Athlon running at over 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM... I should be able to get that working on my box!

Awesome!

[71CH]

I already said that I doubted it would work. Note the parenthesis. There is no way that it would run on the G1. BTW, you don't even need 1 gig of RAM to run compiz. You barely need 512 mb.

[andrews240]

Shouldn't that be Jay Freeman successfully ports Debian to the G1?

Anyway, this is cool. Debian was the distro that I learned Linux on. I look forward to seeing the progress on this.

[Stanovoy]

This is really not all that exciting. The G1 and all releases in the foreseeable future are not computers and will never be. Even if a future release is actually more powerful than computers, the limitation is on the screen size. The G1 is more powerful than most of the computers from 10 years ago, but it cannot possibly run any of the software from back then with reasonable competence. Imagine using the desktop version of Word on the G1. Good luck clicking on any of the buttons up top. What we need is a way to exploit the G1's potential as a mobile companion to the max, not a way to turn the G1 into computer replacements.

p.s. I'd like to hold Jay Freeman to his comment about developing on the G1.

[Crashdamage]

I agree with Stanovoy. I kinda fail to see the point of Debian-on-G1 at all. Android, Debian - each for it's intended purpose. Anyway, like I said, I really think Android actually has a better chance of evolving into a good desktop or netbook OS than Debian does of evolving into a good mobile device OS.

[the_master]

Pics? Video? please?

[shoo]

Saurik on G1.....!!
Our G1 is about to change. For those of us from the iPhone world we know jay made the iphone a fun toy.

Thank you lord.

[saurik]

Let's just say I think Android is a very good adaptation of Linux for the purpose intended, much better than even Mobile LInux, with lotsa future potential. Debian (or Unbuntu or Mandriva or CentOS - pick any disktop distro) is not well adapted for mobile use. Expect lotsa problems.
In fact, I would think Android has a better chance of evolving into a good desktop OS than Debian does of evolving into a good mobile OS.

I've used Linux for a long time and always will. But I'm not even the least bit tempted to try this. A lot more disadvantages than advantages.

This seems to be based around a fundamental misunderstanding of what I'm working towards. I am not /replacing/ Android and putting Debian on the phone. I am setting things up so that when you ssh into the phone (sorry, /telnet/) and type ls -la you don't get "-la: file not found" because you have the most pitiful userspace ever.

Android is designed to do this. If you look at Android it entirely sandboxes itself into /system, /data, and /cache, none of which are part of the standard Unix directory hierarchy. This means you can throw all of Debian and all of Android on there and never will the two ever conflict.

This is /not/ about replacing the GUI, replacing the applications, trying to get some crazy alternative cellular stack, using desktop bluetooth, or any other "he installed Debian onto his phone?" insanity. This is just a matter of taking the following statement to its conclusion: I am carrying around a computer with me, it has a 600MHz processor and a QWERTY keyboard, it has up to 16GB of disk space, and all I'm running on it is a phone?...

Imagine being able to easily pop out nmap and figure out what the IP of the computer you are connecting to is, or quickly rsync some files from your office server to your phone (and even maintain all the permissions, something that wouldn't be possible if you just tried to copy it onto the vFAT SD card), or run your compiles and performance tests rapidly on the device itself without having to continually redeploy your applications to the device over the USB cable.

Seriously, the possibilities here are endless and there is no cost. My method of installation doesn't even make permanent modifications to the phone (everything is on the SD card or exists as changes to the RAM mounted / that by definition gets reset every bootup). /Comparing/ Debian to Android is simply fundamentally the wrong paradigm: put your hands together.

[saurik]

Pics? Video? please?

A video or a picture would be really boring. The end resulting phone looks identical to the previous phone, except now you can SSH into it as if it were a computer.