Dear All,
I currently have a fairly minimal Gentoo install in a chroot, on my ARM-based Android 'phone. The reason it's fairly minimal is that compiling additional packages is very slow.
Hence, I've decided to replace the Gentoo install with a binary distro. I've got debootstrap installed under Gentoo, and am ready to go - but I'm a little confused as to what architecture I need to tell debootstrap to install for, since as I understand it, not all ARM binaries will run on all variants of ARM processor. Can anyone advise, please?
The specific processor is a Qualcomm MSM7200A, and the compiler options I use in Gentoo are:
CFLAGS="-march=armv6 -mtune=arm1136j-s -mfloat-abi=soft -O0"
(the -O0 was a vain attempt to reduce compilation times to a manageable level.)
On 31 January 2012 20:23, Dan vi5u0-alug@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I currently have a fairly minimal Gentoo install in a chroot, on my ARM-based Android 'phone. The reason it's fairly minimal is that compiling additional packages is very slow.
Could you cross-compile from a faster PC? Plenty of posts like this one give tips: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-795194-start-0.html
Any reason you want a pure Linux rather than more phone oriented, more open than Android, Cyanogenmod?
Tim.
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012, Tim Green wrote:
On 31 January 2012 20:23, Dan vi5u0-alug@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I currently have a fairly minimal Gentoo install in a chroot, on my ARM-based Android 'phone. The reason it's fairly minimal is that compiling additional packages is very slow.
Could you cross-compile from a faster PC? Plenty of posts like this one give tips: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-795194-start-0.html
My faster PC doesn't have enough free disc space for an extra set of binaries, libs etc. ;-).
Any reason you want a pure Linux rather than more phone oriented, more open than Android, Cyanogenmod?
What I really want from the distro is not Linux per se (the Gentoo install on my 'phone has no kernel nor udev of its own, for example) - it's standard open-source user-space stuff, like Firefox, Alpine, TeXlive, etc. It's Firefox in particular that's driving me to move to a binary distro - compiling xulrunner on the 'phone takes forever.
On 31 January 2012 22:40, Dan vi5u0-alug@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012, Tim Green wrote:
Any reason you want a pure Linux rather than more phone oriented, more open than Android, Cyanogenmod?
What I really want from the distro is not Linux per se (the Gentoo install on my 'phone has no kernel nor udev of its own, for example) - it's standard open-source user-space stuff, like Firefox
https://market.android.com/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox
Hope that helps, Tim.
Any reason you want a pure Linux rather than more phone oriented, more open than Android, Cyanogenmod?
Gentoo fanati.. err nutter... umm enthusiasts are known for installing Gentoo on anything and everything...!
+1 for a "proper designed for a phone to begin with" ROM though.
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:47:41 +0000 Simon Elliott alug@sionide.net allegedly wrote:
Any reason you want a pure Linux rather than more phone oriented, more open than Android, Cyanogenmod?
Gentoo fanati.. err nutter... umm enthusiasts are known for installing Gentoo on anything and everything...!
Maybe. But /major/ respect for compiling gentoo on a phone.....
(Dan. You must have too much time on your hands.)
Mick
On 31 January 2012 20:23, Dan vi5u0-alug@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I currently have a fairly minimal Gentoo install in a chroot, on my ARM-based Android 'phone. The reason it's fairly minimal is that compiling additional packages is very slow.
I've gone with miui (http://miuiandroid.com) for my android-based Samsung Galaxy S - very happy thus far, although I am yet to establish a successful vpn tunnel to my Centos server, so as yet my goal of one-password-repo-to-rule-them-all* evades me...
Good luck though - gentoo on a droid phone is a step further than I've time for!
Jim
* - one password repo stored somewhere I am root that is, I'm not in the habbit of surrendering anything more than a comodity email password to google/firefox/microsoft/dropbox....
On 31/01/2012 20:23, Dan wrote:
Dear All,
I currently have a fairly minimal Gentoo install in a chroot, on my ARM-based Android 'phone. The reason it's fairly minimal is that compiling additional packages is very slow.
[SNIP]
Bloody hell! Gentoo on an Android! Speaking as a man who runs Gentoo almost exclusively, that's seriously impressive!
Does Sabayon help here? It's a binary Gentoo distro.
Cheers, Laurie.
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012, Laurie Brown wrote:
Bloody hell! Gentoo on an Android! Speaking as a man who runs Gentoo almost exclusively, that's seriously impressive!
I wasn't the first: there's a step-by-step tutorial on getting Gentoo installed in a chroot on Android, at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=789003.
Many thanks to all who replied. In the end, I decided to take the plunge, and ran
/usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch armel squeeze /debian http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
within the existing Gentoo install. I'm pleased to report that the resulting Debian install works fine. After a few apt-gets, I now have, in Debian-under-Android-on-a-phone, the likes of emacs, xterm, sshd, and X via tightvnc's vncserver and the Android VNC viewer app. Firefox is next.
On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 08:23:35PM +0000, Dan wrote:
Hence, I've decided to replace the Gentoo install with a binary distro. I've got debootstrap installed under Gentoo, and am ready to go - but I'm a little confused as to what architecture I need to tell debootstrap to install for, since as I understand it, not all ARM binaries will run on all variants of ARM processor. Can anyone advise, please?
I've used debian in a chroot, following instructions here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10
Also, I've used arch, and there's some information here: http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1361
Good luck, and I would be interested to know what you settle on. Currently I use cyanogenmod and it annoys me that it doesn't give me the full suite of linux text tools. I've tried working out how to get optware running (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/HomePage) but haven't managed it yet.
Richard
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Dan -
Jim Rippon -
Laurie Brown -
mick -
Richard Parsons -
Simon Elliott -
Tim Green