Android and smart phones.

[francois]

I imagine that some of you like me, though recently, got one of those wonderful, practical, but time consuming device called smart phone.

Place your coments here.

For instance, how could Porteus become a good companion.
Or just name some of you preferred applications. For example:
1) Brightest lamp: turning your smartphone into a very bright pocket lamp
2) Aldiko : ebook reader

[WildeGeist]

I was looking at QEMU and other emulators to get a Virtual Machine to run on ARM. I am not good enough to try to Port Virtual Box to ARM for instance.

I think the easiest way to get Porteus to work on ARM is to get involved with SlackedARM ( I think that is the Slackware for ARM Project ).

There is pretty good speculation that Intel and others are coming out with X86 CPU/GPU that will outperform ARM in every way, and take over the Smartphone and Tablet scene; in which case recompiling Porteus for ARM would be a waste. Its best the Devs continue to kick ass in the 86/64 arena. My opinion anyway.

MIPS could be another contender. But I think the new WINDOWS is built for both ARM and x86 for this very reason; x86 will replace ARM in the low power device world.

The best bet for now with devices with Tegra 3 like capabilities is emulators. All this stuff eats a fair amount of power.

Me personally, I am aiming at getting a Lenovo X131e type machine to run Porteus and other F/OSS stuff on for the meanwhile. I am an Apple hater, so I bite my tongue with the Macbook Air which if it had FreeBSD instead of OS X, and made of Polycarbonate, would be my next computer!

Porteus is incredible! I hope it takes over the Linux world like it should.

[Hamza]

@WildeGeist,
I think Ahau had successfully ran Porteus on his ARM Device. That should be confirmed by him.

[Ahau]

I do have a working prototype of "Porteus ARM" running (dual boot with Android) on my Acer a500 (Tegra 2) tablet. Development is suspended right now, however, for two reasons: first, I'm waiting for ARMedSlack 14 to release in final (newer xorg server will work better on the touch screen I think--right click emulation), and second, linux kernel development for the a500 is all but dead, and the latest working kernel version I have (2.38) has some pretty serious deficiencies.

If someone were to pick up the kernel development for the a500 (or donate a Raspberry Pi or other device to me for development, wink wink), then I could probably move it forward a bit more. I don't have a lot of free time these days, but if there are virtual machines for qemu and my schedule allowed it in the future, I could also work on testing kernels for other systems and get something to the beta level for more hardware.

[brokenman]

I will send you a raspberry pie if you continue development!! You will have to wait for raspberries to come into season though.

[Ahau]

Mmmm, raspberry pie...please do. Blackberries have just gone out of season here (though I've had my fill of blackberry cobbler)...mmm...carb coma...

[francois]

@ahau:Porteus on android phones is quite interesting. Are you going to do that: `coup de force` ahau?

Tomas intends to port slax 7 to smart phones:
http://www.tomas-m.com/blog/
The Android application (to put Slax on your android phone's SD card) is almost finished,

[Ahau]

francois,

As I understand it, the Slax Android app will not offer an ARM port of Slax that will run as the operating system for the phone/tablet. Rather, it will be a way to download the intel-compatible version of Slax (I don't know if it's i486 or x86_64) and place the files onto the phone such that you can plug the phone into a computer, and then boot the computer into Slax, using the files on the phone (instead of booting off a flash drive).

I've never tried it, but I imagine this functionality is already possible with Porteus so long as the computer supports booting via usb and the sdcard storing the Porteus data can be made bootable and is detected by the computers' BIOS through the phone (basically, you're using the android phone as a very expensive sdcard->usb adapter). The only thing we're missing is an android app to copy the files and install the bootloader. Given that I'm not an android developer and this can be accomplished for Porteus nearly as easily as installing to a USB drive, I don't have plans to create and distribute such an application.

"Porting" Slax or Porteus to ARM architecture is another story entirely, and this is what I did on my tablet. In this case, the tablet's hardware boots and runs Porteus natively, and I can dual-boot it with android. I would not recommend this for the current generation of phones, for a couple of reasons: first, even on my dual-core 1Ghz ARM processor with 1GB of RAM, the system (running Xfce 4.10) is already not as responsive as I would like. Secondly, I haven't found a virtual keyboard application that I think would be useable when scaled down to the size of a phone. Tablets are another story; I think there might be a market there, but for the most part, this is a novelty for hardcore linux fans. Realistically, it's going to be hard for someone like me (more or less by myself) to develop an operating system that can compete on a broad basis with Android.

There is a third option -- running linux within a 'chroot' environment under Android. There are apps on the google play market to install ubuntu on your android device, and this is what they are doing. They copy a linux system (compiled for ARM) onto the device, then they setup a 'chroot' environment within Android which boots up linux, and then you can swap over to the linux system, rather like running it inside a virtual machine. This doesn't satisfy my needs for two reasons: first, you're using system resources already to run Android, and then using even more to run linux, so you're bound to run far slower than a 'native' installation. Second, when you're running this way, the android kernel is actually running the linux OS (chroot doesn't boot a new kernel, it runs everything from the existing kernel as if the 'chroot folder' is /). The android kernel (as far as I am aware) does not include the aufs patch, which is required for Porteus to run 'live'. So unless I could patch and replace the android kernel (and a different kernel would be required for each and every android device), all I could really install is a slimmed-down Slackware.

Sorry for going off on a million tangents here...

[francois]

If there are tangents here, they are only a few. It seems that although we read the same stuff, my poor understanding of the underskirt of linux (I am sure brokenman will appreciate this one, though I try to restrain myself from making sexist remarks), seems to account for my poor understanding.

The quality of your writing in addition to your thorough knowledge, to which we could add the easiness with which you make it available to others merits the qualification of encyclopedic knowledge. That might be why you have the title of King of docs.

Thanks for these valuable explanations.

[rnport]

Following links are of applications that run linux images on android:
http://linuxonandroid.org/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... rch_result
linuxdeploy: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... ploy&hl=en
https://github.com/meefik/linuxdeploy
http://android.galoula.com/en/LinuxInstall/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... rch_result

Is it possible for porteus to run like this?

Edit:
After going into details of above links I found that this method has already been considered and discussed in detail by Ahau above. I, however, feel that the tablets are becoming stronger very quickly and in no time they will be able to run regular linux easily. The ease of running linux like this scores over other methods.