Re: Running debian + emacs on my Android G1 [was: emacs + orgmode on Ubuntu on Android G1]

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

[sorry this is getting a little off-topic for non-Android users]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 02:02:06PM +0100, Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I just upgraded (!) my G1 to CyanogenMod yesterday, because I want to
> try out emacs on it, too.
> 
> I must say CyanogenMod rocks! It's much more snappy than the stock
> build and the things you can do with it really rock (running debian on
> my phone is so cool) ;)

I agree!  I just upgraded mine to CyanogenMod too, although it's not
required; I was quite happily running emacs and Ubuntu on an older
JesusFreke firmware before.

> Adam Spiers schrieb:
> > On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 04:01:11PM +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote:
> > Sorry for the slow reply.  I don't have time to go into exact details
> > but I updated this page:
> > 
> >   http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsOnAndroid
> 
> The debian "installer" you link to on the wiki is technically very
> unsound. If you look at the installer.sh and debootstrap scripts
> you'll see that they are full of magical thinking, smoke and mirrors.

The Debian links were added by someone else - I've only tried the
Ubuntu image which I linked to.

> e.g. if you want debootstrap to run faster, remove all the "sleep 1"
> calls he inserted, maybe along with the totally fake echo messages.
> You can keep the ascii penguin logo, it's kinda neat. And doing chmod
> 4755 on everything in /system/bin is plain madness. It's clear
> indication that the guy who posted that installer didn't know a bit of
> what he was doing.
>
> (I didn't look at the ubuntu installer.)

Yikes, 4755 certainly sounds mad - however the permissions in my
/system/bin are much saner, so presumably the ubuntu installer doesn't
do that.

> To give you a quick heads up of what I'm doing:
> 
> I find the instructions in
> [[http://bayleshanks.com/tips-computer-android-g1][Bayle Shanks's
> website: tips-computer-android-g1]] technically much more sound. It's
> a bit more involved, but someone with sound experience in systems
> administration could quickly make a good installer out of his
> instructions. Yesterday it took me about 30 minutes to an hour, but
> after that I had a fresh debian install, with just the bits I wanted.
> Together with emacs and the application cache it takes about 512MB, so
> I just resized my ext2 partition to 1024MB with gparted, to make room
> for some org-mode and git goodness.
> 
> Next step I'm going to do is add a non-root user, not sure how to do
> this properly, yet, and configure it to sync my config and org-mode
> files. I don't feel comfortable working as root all the time.
> 
> I'll keep you posted and when I'm done with a working org-mode setup,
> I'll update the entry on the emacs wiki.

That would be great, thanks!

> I didn't run emacs yet, but I have a suspicion that it might run a
> little faster on a native ext3 partition than from an image file.

What do you mean by an image file - does yours involve some kind of
loopback?  My Ubuntu install is simply a root filesystem under
/system/sd/ubuntu (and /system/sd is native ext3) therefore a simple
chroot /system/sd/ubuntu plus mounting of /dev/pts, /proc, and /sys
inside it are sufficient to provide the Ubuntu environment.