Jay Freeman successfully ports Debian for Android

[Sheraz150]

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.

Omg, I know you from Modmyifone! Haha, did you get a G1?

Good seeing Jay working on Android too btw!

[saurik]

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 whole point of my article is installing Debian and Android onto the same device simultaneously and getting the benefits of both platforms at once without compromises. In the end you have Android's entire phone stack and interface with Debian's entire userspace Unix and daemon potential.

[saurik]

Omg, I know you from Modmyifone! Haha, did you get a G1?

Good seeing Jay working on Android too btw!

Yeah, I promised people I would run and get a G1 the minute someone root'd it so we could get a usable user space on it ;P. I therefore dropped everything I was doing Wednesday and drove to LA (about an hour and a half from here) to buy one from a store.

[Sheraz150]

Yeah, I promised people I would run and get a G1 the minute someone root'd it so we could get a usable user space on it ;P. I therefore dropped everything I was doing Wednesday and drove to LA (about an hour and a half from here) to buy one from a store.

Now thats dedication lol, it's about time we get some progress on this whole "Open Source" thing i've been hearing about. Now lets see what its all about!

[saurik]

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.

Technically, this isn't actually a port at all: Debian already supported ARM EABI Linux (aka, Android's kernel) and has for almost two years now. I am just putting thought into the mechanisms of installing it on a G1 and making it work in harmony with Android.

[saurik]

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.

;P I actually think I can get something like WinterBoard working for it as well. (I do a lot of work with JVMs, classloaders, etc., and have published work on things similar to Mobile Substrate for Java. We therefore should be able to do almost identical "change any graphic in any program entirely safely" tricks as we are doing on the iPhone. I'm also going to be looking into video recording.)

[saurik]

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.

I don't think many people, definitely not myself, want to run graphical programs from Linux on Android devices. I actually had a long conversation with the people from LIMO and I think they even agreed: it wasn't really a good way to go, the user interface paradigms are just too different. Luckily, that's not what I'm trying to do here.

Most of the advantages of Debian are not about it being a graphical desktop operating system, they are about it being a strong set of console applications and daemons that make it into a good server. For the same reason that people are excited by ConnectBot (the awesome SSH client in Android Market), people are to be interested in this: you don't use ConnectBot to run word on some remote computer, you use ConnectBot to run vim or emacs or some other console-based text editor on some remote computer (and probably not for terribly long).

Also, this entirely ignores the interest in being able to SSH into the device. When you are working on rather advanced software, such as hooking display routines for something like a theming engine, doing performance critical hardware work like a real-time encoded video recorder, or just poking around and having fun learning about a system, it is incredibly useful to be "on the device", and by "on the device" I mean sitting at my laptop, using it as a giant keyboard and screen (a dumb terminal) connected over PuTTY or some other SSH client into the phone, running all my software there.

I will say that, for example: I did /all/ the development work on Cycorder (the real-time video recorder for the iPhone) "on" the device. I ran my text editor on the device, I compiled on the device, I debugged on the device, and I even did the reverse engineering work I had to do on the device. Of course, I was sitting at my laptop the entire time (well, except for one multi-hour long presentation I sat through, where I actually /did/ type out a massive new feature on the tiny iPhone on-screen keyboard, but I digress ;P), typing on my giant keyboard, but feeding all the directions to the phone.

The reasons this is advantageous are numerous. Sometimes its just difficult to understand what you are doing in a different context, such as the theming engine (if it even works at all). Sometimes you are dealing with particular performance characteristics that make no sense in an emulator (like video encoding). Sometimes you simply can't use an emulator as the emulator doesn't emulate the hardware (like hardware JPEG compressors or video cameras). Doing your development, therefore, running all the tools on your desktop means you have to constantly be transferring end results around, which is just slow/tedious.

So yes, you can easily hold me to that comment, I'm already doing it, and I've been doing similar things for years, on the iPhone now and on previous embedded devices running Linux for clients in the past. ;P

[DesignDawg]

...open source phone that allows us to customize it just as we like. It seems now that the first Android-powered handset has been released we have all been a bit disappointed

Wow. Really? Gonna have to disagree here. That's pretty negative, all things considered. A lot of us are really patiently enjoying the phone, and I for one am very impressed with where it's headed so far...

[refused9150]

I mean from the standpoint of an open source background. Sorry people. Not disappointed as far as the device. Just Androids overall open source latitude.

[Crashdamage]

saurik -
Thanks for all the explanation. I think we all have a better idea why you did the Debian install and where you're going with it. I admit to not doing much more than skimming over it, enough to get it that you were installing Debian along with Android, not in place of it. But I'm not a developer and not so bright anyway, and it went past me exactly what the point of that was. Now I do get it. I shoulda given it a little more thought before posting, after reading your posts it seems kinda obvious now.

Again, thanks. The future of Android looks good.