Jay Freeman successfully ports Debian for Android

[DesignDawg]

...When you are working on rather advanced software,...it is incredibly useful to be "on the device", and by "on the device"

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)....P

These are EXCELLENT points. I was wondering, when I was playing with the SDK, how a developer could possibly test the camera functions out on their computer, since it doesn't have the camera hardware. Pretty hard to test it if it's not emulated. Keep up the awesome work, Jay.

[Priz]

;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.)

Is anyone else a little turned on right now?
(j/k)

Hi saurik,

I donated $10 via paypal to you because I loved your work on Winterboard and Cydia. Thanks for making the iPhone so much better than what Apple only allowed with their strict rules. Looking forward to anything you can whip up for Android.

BTW, as far as Video Recording, check this article out (specifically the "Video" section) as maybe that will affect your work... just an FYI and something to look into.

[RussianSolja]

That is really freakin cool. If I only had the guts to do it...

Lol - I have the gut's. Just need a video or someone to guide me on how to do it and i'll have no problem doing it.

[MrGibbage]

It would be nice to have a *real* linux shell on there. How many times I've longed for the up-arrow to repeat my last command already.

If I get really antsy, I might go for it.

[CJ Chitwood]

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.

Well, then! You obviously haven't installed Pac-Man yet!