Show HN: A miniature Linux distro for non-rooted Android devices | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A miniature Linux distro for non-rooted Android devices

kevinboone.net

94 pointsstonewhite15 comments

I hate to sound like a grumpy neckbeard but what's the world coming to when a clearly pretty clueful guy dismisses android as lot linux without a footnote but then goes on to call busybox and a handful of classic userspace command line tools a linux distribution?

Doesn't make it any less useful, but what's next - calling wine a windows distro?

Agreed, this is no more a "Linux distro" than Cygwin is, but it does sound useful (much like Cygwin's bash shell).

The author states that there is no X server for Android. That is false, and not even hard to verify:

  App name:    X Server
  Website:     http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-server/
  Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.darkside.XServer
  F-Droid:     https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=au.com.darkside.XServer

I'm using this right now on my phone as a mini-monitor tailing a tomcat log on a server I'm ssh'd into. I don't use my phone most of the day anyway, now I can have it do something useful for me.

Another project in the same vein: http://dan.drown.org/android/

As someone who has opkg on his router and NAS... This looks very tempting. Especially on the Android tablet.

Edit: Android says source for this is available on demand. I've asked him to post it on github :)

Looks like this one allows you to cover more ground and doesn't state an issue about dns resolution problems.

This looks really, really cool, especially the vim support. What would be really awesome would be a native port of gcc and other supporting tools to create packages on the platform. That would enable public repositories where people can easily post builds of other apps of note.

This got my hopes up, but I don't see what it does that Terminal IDE doesn't already. I was hoping it would include gcc and the ability to compile things, so that it could be the starting point for a more complete development environment, but no such luck.

with a trivial script to setup bindmounts and such, you can easily run a full linux distro on android's kernel, concurrent with the main Android OS. Debian Kit for Android is just one example. gcc, emacs, ghc, whatever you need is an apt-get install away, w/ the Hacker's Keyboard and JackPal's term emulator, you are in as good or better shape than you would be on Maemo or Meego or Tizen..

>Because an unpriveleged user has very limited access to the filesystem, the entire root filesystem is located somewhere under the Android app's preferences directory. From a Linux perspective this makes no sense, but is necessary. Most Linux utilities — even simple ones — expect a conventional file layout, with directories '/etc', '/usr', etc. This is impossible in this application, and most of the Linux utilities that have been ported to KBOX have required some reworking to account for the unconventional file layout. For the most part, however, the file layout is not particularly visible to the user.

Wouldn't it be possible to use the preloader to fake the root directory. I know that calling chroot itself requires root level permision, but fakechroot [1] uses the preloader to allow non root to use chroot.

[1] https://github.com/fakechroot/fakechroot/wiki

Cool. How does this differ from Terminal IDE?

I had thought along these lines too. AFAICT, Terminal IDE is geared toward more of a developer toolset. Thats not to say you couldn't use this as a dev platform though.

Here https://sites.google.com/site/taldewandroid/ is an overview on how to install OpenWrt on Android without root. This includes a package system too, with dependency management and binary repositories.

No C compiler?

It's not really a Linux distro without a C compiler.

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