
The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi - habosa
http://samuelstern.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/my-ultimate-mobile-setup/
======
ukjadoon
I have a Nexus 7 with a bluetooth keyboard, I rooted it and installed Debian.
I can SSH into it and pretty much do anything I want (I use ConnectBot or
Terminal IDE). I have installed Vim, PHP5 Cli, MySQL and also PHPUnit. For
testing sites locally in a browser, I have installed KSWeb. I also use an RDP
client to access the LXDE desktop on Debian. Is there really a need to SSH
into an RPi when one can have a setup like this?

~~~
frontsideair
What kind of keyboard are you using? I also have a Nexus 7, but it's hard to
find any decent keyboard. Does it hold the tablet, or do you have to support
it yourself?

~~~
ukjadoon
This one [http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-920-003390-Tablet-Keyboard-
An...](http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-920-003390-Tablet-Keyboard-
Android/dp/B0054L8N7M)

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mooism2
From the title I was expecting the RPi to be permanently inserted inside the
Transformer somehow. Being at the mercy of the vagaries of 3G reception /
public wifi provision is the sort of thing that puts me off doing this kind of
thing myself.

Why an RPi as the backend though? Why not something that will compile your
code faster? I recognise that not everyone is comfortable with renting a
virtual server, but if you're going to leave your MacBook at home, can't you
ssh into that?

~~~
qznc
The backend question is a big one and I agree that an RPi seems to be a poor
choice. Samuel Stern has a MacBook Pro, which has much more power, single-
thread and multi-threaded. Nevertheless it probably consumes much more energy
than the RPi.

Other people rent some server, e.g. Matt Might uses Linode [0], but something
like $20 per month flat is really expensive, if you would use it rarely and
not for business. Maybe Amazon EC2? Though I doubt it fits the use case of
weekend use plus one or two hours per week day.

[0] <http://matt.might.usesthis.com/>

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7777
I don't get what the Raspberry Pi is for. The Transformer is a lot faster and
already runs Linux, you could just install Ubuntu/Debian in a chroot and use
that instead of sshing to the Raspberry Pi.

~~~
habosa
I have not found it easy to install Ubuntu or Debian on the JellyBean
Transformer. Since I had already ordered an RPi, this seemed altogether
easier. The RPi also has the advantage of being able to serve as a single-user
server when I want to quickly test a rails project or a backend for one of my
apps.

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tluyben2
More of these articles please! I really like hearing from other mobile people.

Macbook pro is a no-go; the battery life is dropping _fast_. And it's not old.
My Macbook 13 inch is better but also going down. Even with a new battery it's
just too short lived... I have a Hypermac battery and that's definitely the
best buy for mobile mac use. It is really great, but they cost way too much
(imho). I really the way these machines 'feel', but battery life is more
important for me.

When I am in a cramped space or need a lot of time and need all my development
stuff (even Java), I use my Pandora which works like charm. For a bit less
power and same form factor I also still use my Zaurus C860 which works fine
and runs things like Haskell fine. It's just not that easy to do some Crash
when bored/relaxing.

Pandora has over 10 hours battery life for me and I can swap batteries in no
time (so 20 hours). Disadvantage; it's extremely small and low res. I would
recommend and buy one any time.

Transformer prime (TF700) and Pandora are really great; both very portable
systems and just work on the Pandora (full linux install with SSH/VNC/X).

I think, if it could install Linux, the Nexus 10 with a keyboard would be
great solution. The resolution is insane and only for that I will get it. With
a bit of hacking it seems like a fantastic 'monitor extension with a brain'.

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programminggeek
You know, you can do pretty much the same thing with an iPad and the Logitech
Ultrathin Keyboard. I do that with a Prgmr instance and it's pretty awesome,
but by no means perfect. I'm starting to think the ARM Chromebook might be
closer to perfection as I can SSH from chrome anyway and you can get cheap 3G
on there.

I would love a 3g/4g enabled ARM based Macbook Air with 12 hour battery life.
Of course, iPad 4 with 4G LTE would be pretty close for pretty cheap....

------
habosa
This is my mobile setup. Let me know if you have any questions about the
specifics or ways I could improve this. I just finished it today and thought
I'd share.

~~~
w0utert
I'm probably missing something crucial here, but I was just wondering why you
actually need the Raspberry Pi?

I'm don't own any Android devices so I'm not an expert, but wasn't the idea
that you could easily install and run a Linux userland with all your tools,
directly on the Transformer Prime?

~~~
mochizuki
Writing, compiling, and executing Java and Haskell code can't be done (easily,
at least) on the Transformer Prime, so he's just exploiting the batter life
(along with it's inexpensiveness, and effortless syncing) of the Transformer
and using it as a mobile access point to his pi where he can code.

~~~
jeroen94704
The question is really: Why an RPi, specifically, instead of, e.g., your
macbook or any other desktop-class hardware you have at home? When thinking of
a development machine, the first thing that comes to mind is pretty much NOT
an RPi. In fact, for my own RPi development, it is more efficient to develop
under Linux (possibly run in a VM), and cross-compile to ARM than it is to
compile on the RPi directly.

~~~
habosa
The reason for the Raspberry Pi is that it meets the following criteria:

1) Always available (MacBook may not be open and charged) 2) Energy efficient
3) No variable cost (as opposed to EC2 or Linode) 4) Very powerful when
headless (Linux is better than OS X here)

It's not the most powerful backend but that wasn't really the point of this
project. The point was that for $35 I added a dedicated Linux backend to my
already awesome Transformer tablet.

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TsiCClawOfLight
different people already mentioned it: Why do you need a pi!? you can
changeroot or ssh into any arm linux distro from android, it even flatout
replace it. Did I miss something important?

~~~
habosa
This is not easy on the Jelly Bean Transformer Pad, and I have heard it
greatly compromises battery life.

~~~
yebyen
Not true.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linuxdeploy)

In chroot'ed mode, I do not find that my battery life is any less outstanding
than without the chroot.

It's not easy to support dual boot, and I would not be surprised to find out
that booting into Linux directly would compromise your battery life. But I
would be equally unsurprised to find out that it does not. It matters mostly
that you need to have a properly configured kernel.

Not sure if it's possible to share one kernel between android and non-android.
But I'm fairly certain that the bits that make booting into regular linux
impossible are not the ones that control longevity and battery life. (A little
bit fairly certain, anyway.)

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fmstephe
I recently installed Ubuntu on my first generation chromebook.
([http://chromeos-
cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-n...](http://chromeos-
cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html)) This is
a perfect setup for me. I have a linode as well, but found that 3G and
wireless wasn't good enough for out and about (I live in Yorkshire UK).

I cannot say enough good things about the chromebook w/ Ubuntu. It is an
endless pleasure to use. The one caveat to this is that I only use a handful
of terminals and the browser. I suspect that using any of the other GUI
features of Unity is probably miserable (as they are on my i7 machine too)

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frontsideair
This was supposed to be my dream setup too. I got a Raspberry Pi which is
gathering dust on the shelf now. I was so eager to use it when it came out,
then I had a faulty microSD card and lost all spirit to turn it into a credit
card-sized media center. I hope if I can find some spare time, and a working
SD card, I'll achieve this goal.

I also needed an Android tablet a couple months ago, because I didn't want to
miss the tablet side of the Android. (There are not many tablet exclusive
apps, but I'm way too obsessive to miss them.) But unfortunately I couldn't
spare too much money and ended up with a 8 GB Nexus 7.

I wanted it to replace all my laptop needs -I haven't had a laptop for many
years, after my last one died and got a desktop which I still love- but
without a hardware keyboard and a big enough display, it's only great for
reading anywhere. (Which I also don't, I'm too busy most of the time, and at
the other times plain lazy.)

I hope Android ecosystem will mature even more in the near future. Look,
Ubuntu is installable on the Nexus 7 right now. (I haven't done this yet, you
can see the pattern here.) That basically means almost everything you can do
on Linux, you can do it on your tablet too. And if you can support it with
something with more horse-power than Raspberry Pi, you can call it a thin
client/fat server pair.

The only thing left is to have a good tablet that can run Linux, has a big
enough display, and has keyboard accesories. I personally don't like
Microsoft, but the new line of Surface tablets look promising. As long as it
lets me run whatever OS I want to, I'm all for it. Asus Transformer is not a
bad option, but having the keyboard double as the cover and keeping it light
sounds so much awesome.

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intellegacy
This is kind of a newbie question... but how does one develop java code
through SSH?

I thought SSH was run through terminal command line. ie. all text. I can
understand coding in vim with python or ruby through the command line. I'm not
sure how its done with languages that need an IDE? like java

~~~
aidos
No languages strictly _need_ an IDE. I don't really work with Java so I can't
comment with how well you'd get it integrated in VIM. There are a few tips
here that could help [0].

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/253170/tips-for-using-
vim...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/253170/tips-for-using-vim-as-a-
java-ide)

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ekianjo
A detail, but the RPi does not have a 1Ghz ARM processor. Only running at
700Mhz by default. Of course, you can overclock it, but it's not the same.

~~~
lucaspiller
Actually the latest official firmware automatically overclocks it to 1Ghz if
needed.

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Buzaga
I've been thinking about getting this kind of setup too, without the Pi(Also,
I'm in Brazil, it's probably hard to get one around here)

What I was thinking of was getting an Asus Transformer and running Ubuntu on
it, I've read that's possible(maybe without touchscreen, but I just need a
long battery, keyboard, command-line, vim, browser)

could somebody tell me what's wrong with this?(I see browser could be an issue
if touchscreen doesn't work there, but I already use Vimium and I guess I
could circumvent this, I'm more worried about general malfunction or higher
battery consumption)

I'd also like to know if it's possible to get this(vim, terminal, ruby, etc)
directly in a Android JellyBean(since Android runs a fork of linux...)

~~~
frontsideair
There's a vim app on Play Store, which I tried and loved it. I used it on my
Nexus 7 tablet with software keyboard and attaching my USB keyboard via USB-
OTG adapter, and it was a great experience. If I had a Transformer, I'd do all
my coding on it without any hassles.

~~~
frontsideair
Here's the aforementioned app:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.app.vimtouch)

