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

[Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs]

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) ;)

Thank you very much for pushing me over the cliff, I was thinking
about finally rooting my phone for quite a while now! ;)

I have to say one thing about the debian install though:

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.

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.)

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.

> I still need to try and trim down the emacs install, as it takes a
> loooong time to load, and the phone is already pretty short of memory
> in general.  Scot already posted some ideas to this list on how to do
> it; I added a link to his article from the wiki page.
---Zitatende---

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. Also
I have some conditions in my emacs config files for a very slow box
already (my toshiba libretto is even slower than the android phone),
so I'll see if I can get a usable setup.

I'm certainly not going to try X, since I don't like the vnc client,
it's terminal or nothing!

If I decide it's not worth the effort I can always delete my debian
changeroot and resize the partition again ;)

Have nice weekend!
     Friedel
-- 
        Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs <address@hidden>
                             TauPan on Ircnet and Freenode ;)

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