Anyone have experience installing Linux on an Android tablet to use for development work? I'd love to use it with tmux/vim to hack on stuff.
Is battery life worth it?
Is battery life worth it?
If you at least have a kernel source for the SoC, it's doable. However, especially if you don't have the source for your specific device (because manufacturers play fast and loose with the GPL), you'll probably spend the first few days getting it working and then many, many weekends getting it to be usable. I did stop before I got to that point.
Here's some of the issues I ran into:
* The parallel RGB to MIPI bridge doesn't have complete publicly available documentation and it requires LCD-specific configuration. I've sniffed it from the Android kernel with a logic analyzer.
* The touchscreen controller doesn't have complete publicly available documentation and it requires device-specific configuration.
* The BMS doesn't have complete publicly available documentation and it requires device-specific configuration
I guess you can see a trend. :) If you have the time, you can RE this stuff with some basic soldering skills and a logic analyzer or scope.
But actually the issues which made me lose enthusiasm were the following:
* Rotating the framebuffer to landscape orientation in software is freaking slow. Android seems to be doing it using OpenGL ES, but I'm not aware of any GNU/Linux window manager capable of this. The display controller didn't support rotation and the only remaining alternative would have been too hacky for my taste, to use the image processing engine to maintain a rotated shadow copy.
* Limited capabilities: processing speed is mostly OK, but only 2 GB of RAM and the slow framebuffer are not great. There's almost no I/O, essentially you only have a USB OTG port. Tablets are not thermally designed to sustain high loads. Battery life will probably not be that great and it seems difficult to upgrade the battery.
Now, some of this stuff doesn't fully apply to Nexus 9. I expect Google to be better at providing a kernel source closer to that's running on the device and the hardware itself it much more capable, it even has OpenGL (non-ES) support. This still leaves quite a few issues. Chromebooks (used for running GNU/Linux, of course) might be worth looking into.
Basically, do you feel like doing a longer writeup?
I'm sick to death of "Linux on XYZ Android device" meaning a chroot - I would have hoped there'd be more interest in running Debian or whatever everywhere.
The SoC is RK3188 and it uses a proprietary bootloader to do some hardware initialization IIRC.
The device does have an UART port, which I've used.
There is a blog about it here: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
Of course linux provide a more complete ecosystem for developers, but even without replacing android there is still enough to be useful.
It's doable, and battery life is quite good, but having an IDE on a PC to work on the screen layout XML file helps. Also, the Android API documentation layout sucks, which makes it harder to look things up. Auto-complete in a real IDE also helps compensate for how bad the online documentation for the API is.
If it was up to me, the Android documentation would be better, and an API to programmatically set up the screen layout would be readily accessible.
For all of Java's faults, I like how compact the online javadoc is for the runtime library, compared to the crap layout with mandatory frames that Android API uses (or MS .NET, for that matter).
I used "Terminal IDE" for the environment: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spartacusr...
An example Android program to make a "D Pad" to move a circle around on the screen (written using above): https://github.com/roboprog/dpad
I use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. The keyboard has exactly the same layout as my Mac Pro: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E1MRYK2/ref=oh_aui_detai...