Debian For Android Installer Released
dooberrymctavish writes "You can now download an installer and bootloader for getting Debian running on your Android (G1 at the moment) device; the whole install process will take you about 10 minutes, and leaves you with access to the full plethora of programs available in Debian and lets you continue using your phone as it was intended to be: as an Android device with all the capabilities thereof. Here's a look at it running.
That would be a reason to buy this phone....
Must resist purchase of new geek toy...
Debian is for niggers.
Compare that video to any video of someone use an iPhone. Why would anyone want to use a phone that takes 20 minutes to boot, requires a command line to function, and has ZERO games/applications/functionality?
Once again: CLOSED SOURCE FOR THE WIN.
Think Different. Think Better. Think Apple.
Is it just a chrooted Debian installation? I'm assuming so, seeing as Android's just a bunch of Java progs running on a small custom Linux distro.
Just shows Debian booting. What can you do with it?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The only thing more pathetic than a PC user is a PC user trying to be a Mac user. We have a name for you people: switcheurs.
There's a good reason for your vexation at the Mac's user interface: You don't speak its language. Remember that the Mac was designed by artists, for artists, be they poets, musicians, or avant-garde mathematicians. A shiny new Mac can introduce your frathouse hovel to a modicum of good taste, but it can't make Mac users out of dweebs and squares like you.
So don't force what doesn't come naturally. You'll be much happier if you stick to an OS that suits your personality. And you'll be doing the rest of us a favor, too; you leave Macs to Mac users, and we'll leave beige to you.
it can be a serious turn off. But then, this is still great news. Question is, what is the meaning of android capabilities? Does it still mean I am forced to use Gmail?
Yeah I'm talking to you. The wannabe computer programmer who thinks they are good at computers because they can click around the computer enough times and find the reboot button and 'fix' an inherently flawed windows system. You think you're cool because you can pirate photoshop but not know anything about it, get Microsoft Office for free but have the literacy of a 1st grader when writing a paper, and get a copy of Norton Anti-virus because your inherently flawed system is useless without Administrative privileges. Get a clue, you are not smart, you are just a corporate sheep for a company that will bury you if you ever tried to write any software that did anything remotely useful. You are a clickaround and all you know is your ugly gray existence that is Windows.
Want the source code to windows vista?
head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com
I'm tempted to root my phone to use this trick. It almost makes me wish I bought the developer handset.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
Steve Jobs has AIDS LOL - News release posted here
All the video shows is debootstrap being run in a terminal on, presumably, a G1 phone.
Since debootstrap is a shell script that builds a debian chroot and is designed to be run on any linux system, that is not a significant accomplishment, is it?
That's the "installer" portion. The "bootloader" portion would appear to consist of something like:
#!/bin/sh /debian
chroot
Anyway, it's nice to see interest in running Debian on these devices, I guess..
see shy jo
but you can't take the jungle out of a nigger!
Pittsburgh police detectives are trying to identify a man who sexually
assaulted two women this week in Shadyside and Hazelwood by crawling
through open windows.
The rapist assaulted the first woman in the early morning hours
Wednesday and the second Thursday morning.
"I understand its been hot and humid and people leave their windows
open, but people need to make sure they do so in a way so that someone
can't gain entry to their house," Pittsburgh police Deputy Chief Earl
Woodyard said.
Police described the suspect as a thin black man in his 20s, between
5-foot-7 and 6 feet tall. He had braided hair and wore a do-rag, police
said.
In the first assault, he crawled through an open, first-floor window of
an apartment building in the 6300 block of Fifth Avenue in Shadyside
between 1:15 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. The woman living there was sleeping and
heard a noise but didn't get up to investigate. He entered the woman's
bedroom and sexually assaulted her before leaving through the front
door, Woodyard said.
About 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, a woman living in a multi-unit home in the
700 block of Hazelwood Avenue in Hazelwood awoke to find a man in her
bedroom. The man, who fit the description of the Shadyside attacker,
held a do rag over his face as he sexually assaulted the woman, Woodyard
said. The suspect had crawled through an open window.
When the suspect left the Hazelwood victim's apartment, she saw him
drive away in a tan, newermodel sedan. That victim told police her
attacker smelled heavily of cologne.
"Because the second victim didn't hear any noises, but awoke to find him
in her bedroom, we don't know how long he was in the apartment,"
Woodyard said. "We also don't know if anything was taken from the
victims during either assault."
In both incidents, the victims screamed once, and the suspect told them
to stop. But both victims screamed again.
Woodyard said the suspect didn't threaten either victim with a weapon.
"It's possible he may get more courageous and strike again since both of
these incidents happened so close together," Woodyard said.
"Particularly since the second assault happened at a time when it's
light outside and people are moving about."
Police are investigating whether the suspect targeted the women in
advance. The first victim is married, but was home alone, and the second
victim lived alone, Woodyard said. Both victims are in their 20s.
Woodyard said investigators are encouraging any other victims or anyone
with information to call city sex crimes detectives at 4123237141.
Hey, Libertarians!
Guess what, you insufferable nincompoops? Our government is itself the product of a market system. Cities like New York, London, and San Francisco are successful precisely *because* of their enormous governments--they compete for capital, talent, and prestige against cities with small, ineffectual governments that are unable to effectively lure and corral said capital, talent, and prestige. And as goes the city, so go city-states and nations: Somalia, being a libertarian paradise, is a rather unpleasant place to live for non-ideologues. Somalians, those who can, vote with their feet and leave.
Now go suckle Ayn Rand's rotten tits some more and leave the rest of us alone, you stupid fucking Paultards.
Here is the actual code from the bootdeb script.
I particularly like how init is "started" before the kernel is "booted". The "automounter" is also a nice touch. It's also impressive how the kernel boots in exactly 1 second every time.
echo "Custom Linux Pseudo Bootstrapper V1.0 - by Mark Walker"
echo "WEB: http://www.androidfanatic.com/"
echo "EML: admin@androidfanatic.com"
echo " "
sleep 1
echo "Starting init process"
sleep 1
echo "INIT: Debian booting....."
sleep 1
echo "Running Linux Kernel"
sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sleep 1
echo "AutoMounter started"
sleep 1
echo "Type EXIT to end session"
echo "Make sure you do a proper EXIT for a clean kill of Debian!"
echo " "
chroot $mnt /bin/bash
On the other hand, my prediction re debootstrap was wrong. Rather than just use the shell script as designed, the creator of this thing ships an entire pre-built debian system that's chrooted into. Amusingly, this includes a root/.bash_history showing every command he ran while setting it up. (It also includes 104 mb of cached debs in /var, etc.)
Anyway, very amusing.
see shy jo
I visit /. every day and have done so for about a year now and have never seen so much "trolling" on one post. Anyway, Debian on the G1 is pretty cool! It just shows how flexible and amazing open source software can be!
2009: The year of Terminal on the cell phone.
Take that iPhone!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Article mentions Android is based on Debian, so basically what has happened is apt-get was installed (and all required software) which then gives access to the entire debain ARM library.
Is this correct?
It's sad the number of responses saying this is a boot screen... maybe if you don't actually look at it, and just go: 'oh pretty text!'
You can now download an installer and bootloader for getting Debian running on your Android
Well I've tried, you insensitive clod, but he keeps running away, and as it has robotic legs it's faster than me!
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I have the phone, but I am not so sure I am willing to do this...
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
.
Aside from the cool geek factor, why load Debian? It's a distro optimized for servers. The G1 has a good linux system on it (and it's F/OSS) and a set of great tools. Even on the Freerunner, there's a Debian distro available too, but Om2008, Android, and Qtopia and FDOM are way better. Ok, pat on the back to the fellow for being a true geek (I can relate, e.g. I have Android running on my Freerunner), but yeah?
.
Then again, maybe it's because it's Debian? I after to ask it. (here comes the mod-down...) If it was Redhat, Opensuse, Slackware, or even DSL, I doubt it would end up on the front page of /.
So much for the iPhone's alleged superiority as the supreme geek toy.
The android standards were written so you wouldn't install package managers & run native programs. You're supposed to be running Java Xlets. What's wrong with you people?
Well, you boot Android, get Debian on it and the video we're treated to is... ... running apt-get to drag down packages.
Am I the only one who thinks this is totally pointless?
Why would you want a system so closed, inflexible, and proprietary that it makes Windows look good?
With all the thrashing /. has given Vista, we Microsoft fanbois will take what we can get. ;)
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Why does the article/ video say "use Debian on Android"? If you install Debian you are no longer using Android.
I definitely plan to order one of these phones next month (I don't have T-Mobile in my area, so I need to buy the Developer Edition with the snazzy graphics on the back)
I now need to stop procrastinating and (vastly) improve my Java skills and start writing some Android apps.
suck as Knoppix and Ubuntu.
Hey now, they're not so bad...
...but does it run Linux?
For the record, this is just a shell script that runs the commands listed here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10. AndroidFanatics generally doesn't reference it's sources. At least this time they (arguably) provided some value in packaging, but that usually isn't the case. The Android Market Browser it has, for example, is just a republished download of http://www.cyrket.com/. It used to be an iframe, but when I told them I wasn't okay with that they decided to just wget the contents. They don't even have the intelligence/decency to reformat it at all, making the entire thing quite flagrant. Frown pants.
DebiAndroid?
The problem with (originally) Android-based devices is that their power management is done in a completely non-standard way. It's not that it would not be open, but passing tokenized dead mice through a wormhole is quite a pain. Will there be enough community interest to actually ever put the power management to a level that can be used by non-Android distributions?
This is where the Neo FreeRunner shines - not only you can install Debian (or Gentoo) on the device, but you can actually use it as your daily phone / GPS device / music player to a similar extent you can use the Openmoko distribution.
It's not just, or it should not just be a "fun hack" to install Debian on your phone - the point should be that you can use your phone with Debian, similar to what you done on your desktop/laptop computer. Of course, there should not be any need to hack the phone before being able to install own programs on it, but there is already the Android dev phone available so that's not the problem with Google phones.
Reminds me of the Zaurus
http://www.pocketworkstation.org/
Ok, is anyone already porting maemo into G1? Debian based it being.
Finally! But how to get the Ctrl, Esc and Function keys???
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
This looks very cool and has made me a lot more interested in rooting my G1 now that it's very simple to do so. However, this gives me a couple of concerns that I don't find easily-answered and I'm sure others reading this article are probably wondering, too.
-You root your phone, you install the modded firmware...and then at a later date you decide you no longer want any of this and want to go back to a "normal" set of firmware and functionality for your G1. Once you root it and run the altered firmware are you able to do this? If so, anyone got a link for how you'd go about resetting the phone to its factory state (I'm assuming modded firmware would make it difficult to do the standard way in Settings).
-What about interaction with your calling plan? If it's not an official firmware, am I still going to be able to use things like MyFaves and unlimited text 'cause I've got a real low regular minute plan (hence the reason for getting the MyFaves and unlimited data/text).
-If you brick your phone is there an easy way to unbrick it? Kinda like a hard reset?
Please forgive my n00bishness on this, but I figure they're important questions.
"Just a fox, a whisper."