

Show HN: A miniature Linux distro for non-rooted Android devices - stonewhite
http://kevinboone.net/kbox.html

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trotsky
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?

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

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LukeShu
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

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bane
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.

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

~~~
josteink
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 :)

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iuguy
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.

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jimrandomh
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.

~~~
carmen
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..

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gizmo686
>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>

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limmeau
Cool. How does this differ from Terminal IDE?

~~~
mikegirouard
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.

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beishay
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.

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bitwize
No C compiler?

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

