There was a time a few years ago when the first Android phones made it to market, that they seemed full of promise as general purpose computers. Android is sort of Linux, right, or so the story went, so of course you must be able to run Linux on an Android phone and do all sorts of cool stuff with it.
As anyone who tried to root an Android phone from 2010 will tell you, it was a painful and unrewarding process. There was normally a convoluted rooting process followed by somehow squeezing your own Linux filesystem tree onto the device, then chroot-ing into it. You’d then have to set up a VNC server and VNC into it, and eventually you’d feel immensely proud of your very slow tiny-screen Linux desktop that you’d slaved over creating. It was one of those things that’s simple in theory, but extremely convoluted in practice.
But six years have passed since those days, phones have gotten much faster and so has the software for tasks such as rooting, so maybe it’s time to return to the topic of Linux on an Android device. [Pete Scargill] gave it a try when a friend gave him a Chinese quad-core Android phone with a broken screen. He proceeded to put a Debian installation on it, upon which he runs his collection of server processes.
Rooting the phone was straightforward process using the KingRoot app, a sideloaded version as it seems there’s a bogus copy on the Play Store. Then bringing a Linux system to it could be achieved with the LinuxDeploy app. The result is surprisingly useful, after some installation steps upon which he goes into detail.
You might ask what would be the point of this exercise, given that you can do the same thing much more easily with a single board computer such as a Raspberry Pi. But to buy a Pi, SD card, screen, and UPS, as he points out you’d have to spend a lot more than you would for a second-hand phone from eBay — or a free, slightly broken, one from friends or family.
If getting more from your Android phone is your thing, perhaps you’d like to know about installing Busybox on it. We’ve also advocated for using old Android phones for ARM dev.
