Re: Less obvious Android uses
Reply #2 –
Well, I don't like Terminal IDE. It's really Android focused and makes some concessions in order to be able to run on devices that aren't rooted. But as luck would have it, the whole Debian chroot process seems to be already automated by software like
Debian Kit and
Lil' Debi. I decided to try Lil' Debi.
At first I kind of failed, perhaps because I went with the default mirror which was rather slow. Apparently if it times out it doesn't try again but just skips the package in question, and I ended up without apt -- which was pretty much the point of trying in the first place. I tried to grab it through wget for installation with dpkg, but wget didn't work. I then tried to download the apt package through an Android browser followed by running dpkg -i, but it came up with incomprehensible errors. I ended up deleting the whole attempt.
I then tried again and made sure to select the armhf architecture along the way, which is supposed to be better and faster if your processor supports it. I'd imagine that pretty much any phone or tablet made after 2010 does. The mirror list is somewhat hard to use because it isn't sorted by region or country like in actual Debian, but I found a .nl mirror which turned out to be really fast and dependable. Unfortunately Wheezy came up with some odd error, but yet another retry with Jessie was the magic bullet. I now have a properly functioning little Debian installation on my phone.
A bad surprise is just how slow it can be. Stuff like Vim goes back to the '90s and it's as fast as can be, but apt-get takes forever to read the package lists, calculate dependencies and such. Although I didn't bother checking with top, I'm quite sure it's the CPU rather than an I/O bottleneck because of my phone becoming noticeably warmer to touch in the process. I imagine commenting out some stuff in /etc/apt/sources.list might be able to speed things up in that regard.
The only remaining problem is that although the few minutes I spent on this were successful, I haven't been able to find any nice portable keyboards. Basically I'd want something like the Cherry G84-4100LCMEU-2 that was a little more like a normal keyboard. The G84-5200 is unfortunately more or less the same thing with a numpad added. The Matias Mini Quiet Pro looks a little more interesting in some ways, but damn is it heavy.
