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Lets just leave it at there's a reason people have had to write things like this:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Introspecting_Dbus

ps avx; /var/log/*, ipcs and netstat -apn are all much cleaner.

It's as you said: Nokia N900, hands down.
You get:
1. Fully unlocked phone, unlocked bootloader and real Linux.
2. Loads of "hacker" tools and apps.
3. Busybox ash(stock) or full Bash if you want.
4. The phone part is fully scriptable with dbus commands. There's even a dbus monitor daemon to run a script when a certain dbus signal is sent.
5. Hardware keyboard, decent specs(CPU's a bit weak, but greatly overclockable), and good screen.
6. Debian Chroot gives full LXDE system right on your phone if you need it.
7. Real web-browser functionality: tablet-friendly stock microB(FF based, renders like FF 3), Firefox Mobile, Chromium(desktop version basically), Opera

I'm a big Nokia N8x/N9x fan, but I'd also add that the HP Veer has a full hardware keyboard and Busybox stock with installable Bash, and root access. The guys at WebOS Internals have done a great job of documenting Linux Applications for WebOS devices:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Linux_Applications
Bash setup:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Setup_Bash

It's as you said: Nokia N900, hands down.
You get:
1. Fully unlocked phone, unlocked bootloader and real Linux.
2. Loads of "hacker" tools and apps.
3. Busybox ash(stock) or full Bash if you want.
4. The phone part is fully scriptable with dbus commands. There's even a dbus monitor daemon to run a script when a certain dbus signal is sent.
5. Hardware keyboard, decent specs(CPU's a bit weak, but greatly overclockable), and good screen.
6. Debian Chroot gives full LXDE system right on your phone if you need it.
7. Real web-browser functionality: tablet-friendly stock microB(FF based, renders like FF 3), Firefox Mobile, Chromium(desktop version basically), Opera

I'm a big Nokia N8x/N9x fan, but I'd also add that the HP Veer has a full hardware keyboard and Busybox stock with installable Bash, and root access. The guys at WebOS Internals have done a great job of documenting Linux Applications for WebOS devices:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Linux_Applications
Bash setup:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Setup_Bash

There's a bunch of comments talking about how impossible this is, but it's really not that difficult. It costs less than a few million USD to do it across an entire Enterprise using software (and hardware) specifically designed for the purpose. I think I could put together a cheap version for a family-type scenario using freely available software and hardware lying around the house. Companies like Vericept (aquired by Trustwave), Vontu (acquired by Symantec), and even NIKSUN all play in this specific space.

Check out the xplico project. It's basically the successor to dsniff. It's free and opensource. It will do a lot of what the commercial products do, but without the bells-and-whistles like case and workflow management, access control, audit, FIPS compliancy, etc.

Install a Linux system with a simple HTTP proxy service enabled using a hostname that is accessible both via their local home network (WiFi) and publicly (i.e. cell network), configure the iPhones to use said proxy, allow authenticated connections to the proxy, install xplico on the proxy system. You'll be able to see who goes where depending on the granularity of the protocol dissector. For example, with SMTP, it will decode the To, From, Subject, etc headers. HTTP has the Host, URI, etc. I think xplico also support various IM protocols -- including Facebook. But I haven't really looked into it recently. The framework is extensible, so if you have the resources you could probably build a protocol dissector for the Words with Friends application (but I bet it just uses HTTP). To top it off, I think xplico even has a nice web-UI for the management piece.

If you wanted to take it a step further, you use something like described on this wiki article to set up an SSL-in-the-middle. You can install a trusted CA certificate on the iPhones using the iPhone Configuration Utility. Then you can use that CA to sign certs for domains on the fly, legitimately decrypting all the traffic. This will require quite a bit of CPU, though. I bet if you created the certificates with a far out expiration you'd eventually have a nice cache-hit-ratio.

That said, the post sounds a bit too much like, "please do my job for me!"

Lets hope this is the start of a true PSVita homebrew scene

Homebrew is great! Piracy, not so much. It's widely acknowledge that the original PSP had so many pirates that making games for it was uneconomic. Tragedy of the commons: everyone wants to pirate, buy hopes that everyone else will buy enough games that there's plenty of investment in making new games.

Homebrew done right is WebOS Internals. Mature, with a strong code of ethics and a professional (but skeptical and independent) relationship with the vendor. Nobody speaks l33t in the WebOS homebrew community.

Here's hoping the PS Vita homebrew community is like that.

Since the asker wanted debian specifically, why not link to the chroot for debian? http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/DebianChroot

Because I hadn't found it! The OP wants "real Debian" and not a Chroot (and has commented nicely to say so), but I am probably going to go with this DebianChroot. Thanks for pointing it out.

I've been looking around for something very similar, and I found that you can run "UbuntuChroot" on the HP TouchPad:

      http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/UbuntuChroot

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's close. I've specifically been looking at solutions for the HP TouchPad for this since I was given one as a gift. I also would greatly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and would rather have straight Debian rather than a Chroot, but this is as close as I've gotten so far.

Agreed - I do this and it works great. There are a couple of rough edges perhaps getting the best keyboard setup but once you've chosen what you like with that, it works well. I have some crashes with the browsers - both FF and Chrome, but I don't really use it for browsing with under Linux on the TP, rather, for developing on the road when I can't take a full machine with me. Xournal also works great for taking notes, and, yes, you can install printer drivers and software and print from it just fine just like Linux on other systems. You can also install a compiler chain and compile your own code. I needed some updated versions of several pieces of software that were availble via apt-get but a little dated. No problems so far doing that.

I've been looking around for something very similar, and I found that you can run "UbuntuChroot" on the HP TouchPad:

      http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/UbuntuChroot

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's close. I've specifically been looking at solutions for the HP TouchPad for this since I was given one as a gift. I also would greatly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and would rather have straight Debian rather than a Chroot, but this is as close as I've gotten so far.

webOS has SIP courtesy of webos-internals http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Linphone

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Accessing_Linux Very simple to get Root access.

It's a shame Sprint has abandoned the HPalm line. Hopefully it will gain traction on Verizon and ATT. No 'jailbreaking' necessary. The platform is open and easy to modify to your heart's content. HP actively recognizes, encourages, and works with the homebrew community.

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Main_Page

WebOS Devices have a great homebrew community that HP supports. HP donated servers and help them port some of the homebrew only apps. (One example: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/06/hp-soothes-homebrew-crowd-by-reaffiming-support)

I've blogged about it before as well ( http://bryanquigley.com/uncategorized/hppalms-webos)

From the webosinternals wiki: ( http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Accessing_Linux)
"In general, simply installing the Palm SDK gives you everything you need for full access to the Linux operating system on the Pre or Pixi. There is no special "rooting" or "jailbreaking" process. Simply installing the SDK provides you with unlimited access to the Linux operating system logged in as the root user. Palm does not see this as a bad thing. Palm provides all these tools for download by anyone, anytime, for free."

Actually, it's not; check out WebOS Internals for a good introduction to how the homebrew community works for WebOS.

It's okay for Apple to decide to sell appliance.

Now there are different ways to do it.

Take my current phone : Palm Pre running WebOS. It's nice, functional and if I'm an average user it does everything I want.
It perfectly fulfils the "appliance" role.
Now this device isn't locked down. At all. Right out of the box, without needing any exploits or whatever, it can be switched into developer mode (by just typing the proper command in. Used to be a nod to the konami code, but recent version of the webOS have also a shorter and easier to type alternative). Then I can pretty much do whatever I want with the device.
If you want Palm-approved and checked applications, to be run in the default safe walled garden, go the standard route (and use the official Apps downloading client).
If you want to experiment with something else, switch temporarily the phone into developer mode and use it to install Preware, then you can also install applications from indie source, etc.

Lambda users use the phone as an appliance, geeks can play around with it if they want.
In result, the Palm Pre is a nice device with interesting capabilites.

The same goes for Maemo and Android powered device, or even - gasp! - evil-Microsoft Windows Mobile powered one (although this might change with Windows Mobile 7).

Whereas, Apple strategy :
iPhones/iPad/iPod are appliance, too. And Apple goes to great length making sure it remains so. You want to do something with your Phone ? And it wasn't approved by His Majesty Jobs ? Too bad for you ! If you want to do something beyond the arbitrary set of crippled feature that Apple condescended to allow to 3rd party developers, you'll have to jailbreak the phone to unlock its full possibilites. In order to do so, the only way is to exploit bugs in the official firmware. But Apple might patches this hole in the next firmware.
And beware, the next firmware might be done in a way which specifically bricks jailbroken devices.
For the average users the device works so,so (there are complains about missing features from average users too). For the geeks, the device is almost useless, they'll move to something else (Android, Maemo, webOS, even Windows Mobile)
In result, the iPhone/iPod/iPad are just expensive toys with a nice shining polished finish.

but the next 10 years of computer industry evolution are going to be very confusing for you, as the mainstream market increasingly ignores the tech specs that geeks obsess over in favor of user experience considerations that are far more relevant to normal users.

I'm perfectly okay with the industry shifting from massive multi-purpose customisable modular beasts (like our current desktops) toward ready-to-use special-purpose consumerist appliances (you want to read a book ? I'll sell you an E-Reader !). As long as the maker don't use every mean in their power just to make sure the things remain locked down. Sorry, but I value my freedom to tinker too much (And my ability to fix and repair stuff myself too).

Most constructors are indeed going that route (leave an open door for tinkerer).
Apple is the lone rider doing otherwise (fucking customer who want to do a bit more with their own legally bought devices). The only reason for their success is that they entered the market early and managed to get quite some mindshare (leveraging their fandom and their former success with iPods). But I'll be pretty much happy without them.

Android has its own issues. For example, the game some Android phone makers play with modders, where every version change unroots phones, or actually bricks (as in permanently trashes w/o change to reflash) devices.

I actually miss Windows Mobile. To use the phone to its fullest capacity (yes, including capacity), I had to do no hacks, no low level patches. Just install the right program and go.

Palm's WebOS is like that, root out of the box (well, with the developer's mode code activated by typing from the keyboard, which Palm has pledged not to remove, and even if they did, you can always install ssh then and have a prompt to use.) and it has the ability to install apps both from the official "App catalog" and homebrew apps.

There's a thriving homebrew community, which makes unofficial apps, patches the OS without needing to flash a new ROM image (though no patches are needed for full access), and makes themes for WebOS. Palm's WebOS is also a lot more like Linux under the hood (Android of course shares the custom Android Linux kernel but that doesn't make a GNU/Linux system by itself) than Android. Palm has also released an official "PDK" in beta for native apps, but you can get or make homebrew native or JavaScript apps without the official PDK. (Linux games and emulators port easily, as it includes now SDL as well as OpenGLES.)

A lot of people sing the praises of Android's openness because it has the Linux kernel and some open source Android components, and Google has a reputation for being a "good" company, but really the Palm Pre and also Nokia's N900 (which is basically a Linux PC in a phone...) are much more open for hacking than Android.

Too bad Palm is in trouble and the N900 is a transitional device. Nokia is making some big changes to Maemo, going with their historic tendency to break backwards compatibility with new versions in both Maemo and Symbian, so people with N900s are getting the software rug pulled out from other them. Palm, as everyone knows who follows these things, is in deep financial trouble.

I'm happy I got my Pre though, it's really an excellent somewhat underrated device with a terrific operating system that in a lot of ways (multitasking managment ("swipe to close"), openness, large media-drive partition program installation for software like games instead of Android's limited RAM space) is superior to Android. The only thing that's missing is the large software library, though WebOS has over 2,000 programs available for it, so I've been surprised at what I can do with it anyway, including 3D games unavailable on Android and open software and tinkering that doesn't rely on you re-flashing the device unnecessarily or rooting it from an exploit that could be closed any day... If you want a modern operating system that is as open as Windows Mobile without its drawbacks, I'd recommend the Palm Pre or the Nokia N900, in spite of their drawbacks. I must admit though the new HTC Evo 4G on Sprint is making me wonder if my next phone will be Android. I do hope Palm will make it though.

Developing for webOS is perhaps even better for developers. Personally, I hate Java. I think I'd rather go through the pain of learning Objective C. I wasn't a big fan of JavaScript, either, until I started working with it for webOS apps. Now, with the PDK (plugin development kit) coming out, developers can write in C/C++ and access SDL for applications that need that extra oompf. The underlying Linux OS is readily accessible, moreso than it is on Android, I've been given to understand. There's a tremendous homebrew community out there creating patches, themes and more. Check out http://webos-internals.org/ if interested in seeing that side. And, with Palm-blessed sideloading of apps, developers can make their own way.

Your comment would make sense if EFL/E17 did not already support OpenGL ES on embedded devices. Illume, the E17 variant designed for mobile/embedded devices, already runs quite well with hardware/OpenGL acceleration on platforms like Maemo, and I already have built and successfully run EFL-based OpenGL apps on the Palm Pre (available in the WebOS Internals WIDK tree).

Evas was designed from the ground up to be modular and support every graphics platform known to man. Windows GDI, DirectX, iPhone OS, X11, WebOS, native Linux Framebuffer, SDL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES - you name it, EFL runs on it. Evas will take advantage of hardware acceleration when it is available, but benchmarks actually show that in many instances, when it comes to regular UI graphics operations, OpenGL/hardware accelerated interfaces don't necessarily perform better than Evas' own software engine and in several cases are actually worse -- on the Palm Pre, for example, GLES is actually much slower at doing things like alpha blending. So in that respect, yes, hardware does have some catching up to do.

Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones. :)

You also forgot Palm, who have WebOS, which is more "Linux like" than Android (No forking here!) Palm's WebOS is often thought of by Android fans as being so Apple-like that they immitated the closed source nature of Apple. Nothing is further from the truth.

By the way, Nokia's market is limited to Europe (and the third world, but they don't buy smartphones in India, Africa, and the Far East), but there, they are the Blackberry of Europe with regards to smartphones. In other words, there are arguably more N and E series Nokia owners in Europe than any other smartphone. (Those *are* smartphones, albeit some of the older Symbian ones are more on the Palm Treo type of Smartphone technology than iPhone, very capable devices but very old-fashioned interface. Though it should be noted that they had a mobile WebKit browser before Apple did on the iPhone for Symbian's "Nokia browser"!)

Palm not only has root available on all their WebOS phones,

Android is Open Source, part GPL and part Apache.

It's partially open source. Ever seen the source code for Android Google Maps or any of the other Google apps on Android?

WebOS is closed source, it uses the Linux Kernel but most of the OS is proprietary.

It has a lot of open source components. Not just the kernel. WebOS is a recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't, it contains many of the elements of Linux besides the kernel. Heck, it even contains an ARM assembler on-board. (And mine contains gcc too, but that's because it has a Debian chroot installed. :) ) Even the closed-source stuff is mostly HTML5 and Javascript, is not obfuscated, and is easily modifiable.

I cannot customise nor install a custom version of WebOS on a Palm device.

You can customize WebOS quite a bit, and literally hundreds of patches and themes are available for it. Yes, few custom ROMs have been developed for WebOS, but since you don't need to do anything special to get root, or to customize WebOS, there's not much of a need to flash a new ROM.

Hi, I'm dtzWill--the developer who ported quake over.
This is not just a tech demo (well opengl, for now, is) but quake is/very/ playable!
Much effort has gone into making this more playable over the last two days or so-- the beta seemed to hit news sites, that was back when I was fighting things like the compiler breaking my code on anything other than -O0.
See the wiki for almost latest information.
Note that instructions to try out the latest before I release are on the wiki.
Finally, a release is probably going to be made tonight so those that own a pre... beexcited!

Hopefully Palm will get this one right as their App Catalog evolves. Palm is trying to walk a fine line by supporting both self-signed apps outside the App Catalog and official, reviewed apps inside the catalog. It will be interesting to see if the developers begin looking at webOS as a viable distribution platform. I think the benefit is that, like the iPhone, webOS customers (Pre & Pixi) will be willing to pay for apps. The downside, of course, is that the self-signed apps will have to develop their own payment platform. The WebOS Internals folks have done a fantastic job of developing a feed system for homebrew applications and patches for webOS. Ill have an interview with Rod Whitby, founder of WebOS Internals on my blog later this weekend: http://pre101.com/

Roy

I was under the impression that the Konami code just allowed unsigned apps to be installed, not root access.

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Accessing_Linux

I love my pre. Palm is encouraging the homebrew community, and once you install preware, getting most of the things you wish were in the default OS is really easy via patches. Development is open (albeit just javascript for now), and the UI is responsive, even without using the GPU yet. Palm just hired Mathew Tippet from AMD, so speculation is that WebOS will likely start using the GPU soon and become a whole lot smoother (and it's not bad now!).

One benefit of choosing the html/css/javascript approach (hence, the 'Web' in WebOS), is that the barrier to entry is reduced for people (like me) who have never developed for a phone before. I'm excited to have a phone I can write my own stuff for without much effort. Heck the (free) SDK runs just fine on linux. That's a first.

And, of course, it's a linux phone. And you don't have to jailbreak it to get that access. Connect with novaterm, and you are in a busybox session. The phone runs iptables for firewalling. It has standard network interfaces. Vi and Wget are already there. You can enable cron, install openssh, etc. A couple of things that I've already done was to put an ad-blocking /etc/hosts file on, and to also customize the autoreplace dictionary (shame there's no good GUI app for that yet).

Linkees:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps

We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that's bad, but with the impending "stuff" that's coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.

If you didn't get a response in a timely manner, let me apologize to you. We should have done a better job on this, and I apologize for this. I'm working with the people I work with on this to try to make sure we do a better job of this moving forward. Good news is we've hired some people -- one's started, one starts next week, and the third starts the week after that, and that'll give us some great people and some new resources to make sure this gets fixed and works properly.

As the previous poster started, unlike the iPhone, there is a very active home brew community which Palm has not only blessed, but has assisted with:

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware

See:
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Linux_Applications

Enjoy your gcc.

the Palm Pre has a standard OpenEmbedded based distro. you can install packages from the OptWare repository. enjoy fully supported, debugged and tested Linux components that are updated on a regular basis--all written by very talented engineers who are committed to getting awesomeness to customers as often as they can. (has Nokia ever released updates as often as Palm has for webOS?)

don't like javascript apps? rip out the webOS window manager and put whatever you want on it. or maybe you want both. you can always switch between the two. the development community has already figured out how to do this.

and the Mojo javascript development environment does have its strengths. it's the first platform since the computers of the 80s where you can hack on it right out of the box.

how could you not love a company that made the contra code an officially-supported way of entering development mode?

closed as they can get away with (e.g. MacOS and WebOS).

Say what you will about WebOS licensing, but because all the built-in applications are just written in Javascript, it's trivial in practice to customize and extend them.