Develop Bugs

Can we natively run Ubuntu on the Desire?

Hello,
I'm a recent Android user and I'm fascinated by this phone, much over iPhone/iOS.
I'm an old Linux dog and I was wondering about the Desire running Linux.
I've seen recently somebody started Ubuntu on the HD2 by modifying the bootloader (haret), we have the Linux kernel booting natively on the Desire, so instead of an Android image can't we just boot a linux image?
The vnc running solution is not quite what I have in mind. I want to run Ubuntu natively on the hardware so I have a few questions:
-does the desire kernel support KMS? or should I try to compile an xorg driver for the snapdragon video chipset?
-do the other drivers from the kernel can be accessed as simply as in linux? I mean in linux every driver I need is compiled in the kernel, so the desire kernel should already have all the necessary drivers in it, for wifi, touchscreen, etc, just for the sistem to use them. So can a linux use them like android does?
-r/w access I think can be bypassed as long as we boot from the sd card, I've seen the solution on this forum, correct me if I'm wrong.
-I've developed a few branch distros based on Ubuntu for my work, but all of them are x86/x64 based, so it's just package customisations, here ve have a non x86 CPU so it must all be cross-compiled, i know there are arm repos for Ubuntu, are they snapdragon compatible?
I know this area is Android development and not Ubuntu development but here are all the guys that really know something about the inners of the system.
Please pardon my English, I did my best.

afaik no one has been able to get debian running on desire.
I'd start with that if I were you.

I tried to get Debian to boot on the Desire and it turned to be impossible to boot. If you can get Debian to boot than naturally Ubuntu would boot without any issues.
I was using the VNC method though.

Well,
you can't install Ubuntu right away...
but you can make a fairly usable Linux modifying some of the available ROMs around.
The most difficulty thing is the X11 system, I don't know if there are any driver...
if android use Framebuffer, maybe you can run X11 over FB.
the rest all can be arranged... removing dalvik & core android... add basic gnome stuff, &c...
if you find some solution for dual boot and want to make a "normal" linux for HTC Desire, I can help you in this for I don't want to be flashing a custom image, then my normal "daily-use" android every now and then

It would be brilliant if we could get Maemo running on the Desire. Considering it is after all just Debian linux it should not be an impossible task. The only difficulty is drivers but that will come with time.

These days I'm busy with my exams,
I started the thread earlier than I can get to work for data/ideas collecting.
Now for what I plan on doing:
-boot a kernel and load the initial files from the sd card instead of internal flash:
h**p://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=689911
-put a simple init script to show "hello world" and drop you to a bash prompt,
from there is Linux installing/debugging
The drivers should be provided by the kernel: /dev/eth0 or /dev/wifi0 for wifi, /dev/fb0 framebuffer, etc etc etc.

[Q] Android linux and kernel development

I have a list of things that I want to do for my flo, and I have no clue where to start.I actually don't even know if this is the correct forum to ask this in, but here goes.
1. I want to be able to use an external WiFi adapter android, and looped Linux images, how can I do this? From everything I've read it seems it starts with including drivers in your kernel for the WiFi adapter. How do I do this? I've read around 10 different tutorials and each are different.
2. I can mount a Linux image inside of android and run it, that's cool, but slow and ineffective. I want to boot into Linux and kiss android goodbye Why do we have to use vnc to connect to the GUI instead of just starting one up? Is it simply because a lack of drivers that connect the GUI to the hardware?. I know that there isn't a version of Linux that will boot on the flo, so why can't I make one? My problem is I don't know where to start. What part of android or Linux has he be coded/compiled differently to work. There are many images that are based on the arm instructions, why is it not possible to just put extract that image and mount it to boot? I believe that a kernel is somewhat of a bridge between the software and firmware, but I don't know what has to change in any of it. I would like to start with a basic non-gui flavor of Linux, then worry about gnome or KDE later.
Any help in the right direction is greatly appreciated. I taught myself JavaScript and HTML back in the 90's just so I could start my own website and say I built it myself. I can learn, I just don't know what I need to learn. Everyone has to start somewhere, I say go big or go home.

Bump
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda app-developers app

[Q] LinuxOnAndroid, LinuxDeploy and GNURoot - plea for help

Here's a summary of my (bad) luck with LinuxOnAndroid,
GNURoot, and LinuxDeploy on a ChainFire rooted
(CF-Auto-Root-mondrianwifi-mondrianwifixx-smt320)
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4" (SM-T320 KitKat) tablet.
I'm new to Android and XDAdevelopers. My goal is to have
a GNU/Linux ARM development environment on Android
so that I can experiment with porting my C signal processing
algorithm software and X/OpenGL display tools to a tablet.
I also want to see what it can do in terms of "computing"
(number-crunching); I'm not expecting greatness, but
perhaps goodness.
I would greatly appreciate any help that anyone can provide
me to overcome the obstacles I'm encountering - including my
own ignorance. In the Android world, it seems that problems
are not "portable"; they're specific to a device and/or vendor.
While general advice is welcome, that which is specific to the
SM-T320 would be most helpful.
LinuxOnAndroid
LinuxOnAndroid was my first choice because, after much pain,
I got it working on my Droid Razr-M smart phone (Android 4.2.x
JellyBean). On the phone it had several problems: 1) the
bootscript.sh was defective (required much editing);
2) the LARGE (only 4GB) Fedora 19 image is too small to be
useful; 3) the phone is computationally challenged;
4) the phone is display and keyboard challenged. Hunting
on the LinuxOnAndroid website reveals that the Fedora 19
image can be resized fairly easily; I enlarged mine to 16GB.
After much avaricious lusting for a good price ($250), the
quad-core Snapdragon 2.5GHz Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 with
16GB internal and an added 64GB external SD card became
attractive for experimentation. While the hardware limitations
are, presumable/hopefully alleviated, Android 4.4.x (KitKat)
seems to be challenged in new and different ways. In particular,
you can't use ext4 formatting on the external SD card. Google
(and/or Samsung) apparently considers paying royalties to
Microsoft for exfat (with its defective everything-is-executable
permissions) to be preferable to using superior extN formats.
So much so that they effectively prohibit one from using ext4
on the SD card - even though the Android system itself uses it.
WTF?!?!?!?! Defaulting to exfat is fine, but prohibiting/impeding
extN is unacceptable.
Consequently, I put the expanded LinuxOnAndroid Fedora 19 ISO
image on the exfat SD card, and since that image is formatted
internally for ext4, I hoped that Fedora on Android would not
be damaged goods. I pointed LinuxOnAndroid to the
fedora-19.HUGE.ext4.v3.img image I put in directory
/storage/extSdCard/linuxonandroid/fedora-19.HUGE.ext4.v3.
Unfortunately, there seem to be other things that make
LinuxOnAndroid fail for me. Installation puts things in
/data/data/com.zpwebsite.linuxonandroid/files. The
bootscript.sh it loads there doesn't work for me. Despite being
updated from the version that I tried on my phone, it seems
to be incompatible with KitKat 4.4.x. I spent considerable
time googling for a solution and editing the file, but to
no avail; Fedora 19 will not boot. Changes include adding
lines to turn selinux off/on, adding explicit "su" before
mkdir and mount commands, and adding references to
/storage/extSdCard. Complaints about the loop device
not existing went away, but repeated attempts to start
LinuxOnAndroid without a reboot of the android
device fail because the loop device remains in use. Currently
there is an error creating etc/resolv.conf because an
earlier mount fails. (I attached a screenshot of the errors.,
booterrors.jpg.) I have eased permissions (to 775 from 755)
in the ISO image file for root and root/cfg since the complaints
refer to $mnt/root/cfg. Also attached is my edited
bootscript.sh(.txt) which doesn't work.
DeployLinux
Deploylinux looks slick and installation appears to be highly
configurable, with support for many flavors of Linux. It
looks like you should be able to point it to
/storage/extSdCard/linuxdeploy/linux.img (I created the
directory) for installation. Unfortunately it can't even create
the installation image file linux.img. Googling this problem
reveals that it is widespread. Some kind of protections (they
look fine) and/or KitKat problem? Who knows. Everyone seems
to have trouble, and no answers are forthcoming.
GNURoot
In some ways, GNUroot looks the most promising of the trio.
First, it does not require the tablet to be rooted. Initially,
I installed the Fedora Remix. Installation was very simple
and also successful. Unfortunately, this seems to be an
ancient version of Fedora. "uname -a" reveals no information
about what version it is (16, 17, 18, 19, 20 ???). "yum update"
fails - perhaps because it is such an old version that there
are no longer any repos available for it. This is very
unfortunate for me, because I vastly prefer Fedora to
Debian-based Linux. (I dislike apt-get, apt-cache and dpkg
intensely; give me rpm and yum any day.)
Next I tried installing the WheezyX Remix. That, too installed
easily and successfully. In this case, "apt-get upgrade" and
"apt-get update" worked fine, and "apt-get install 'xfce4*'"
spent hours installing around 2000 new packages (many of which
didn't seem to have anything to do with XFCE, though useful).
The problem here is that I could never make it do anything
X-related. VNC Viewer would not connect to it. Furthermore,
WheezyX doesn't clean up after itself. Every time I tried it,
I had to use localhost:N+1 in VNC Viewer, where N keeps growing.
Manually cleaning up the lock files is annoying. At least this
provides a functioning Linux, but a only in the sense of a
console "window". I also could not make autofs work to mount
my assortment of home Linux workstations as /net/machinexyz;
perhaps it works (or is configured) differently than in Fedora.
Bottom Line
I appreciate the hard work of the developers of LinuxOnAndroid,
LinuxDeploy and GNURoot. I'm frustrated to be so close to, yet
so far from having a full-up Linux running on my "hot" tablet. I
really would like to be able to have a full-up Linux development
environment on ARM via Android, and begin porting some of my
signal processing software to it.
I would appreciate any help anyone can provide to help me reach
this goal. So far my experience with my new tablet has been
restricted to mindless media consumption, which is not why I
spent $250 on it.
So far, I am disappointed that Samsung and/or Google have,
in my opinion, removed the Linux goodness on which Android
is based. Apparently Richard Stallman is correct: GNU is the
heart of Linux - LiGNUx.
TIA!

Linux & Heimdall

Just want to flash TWRP and root sm-t700 using linux anyone tried this?
Sent from my Moto G using XDA Free mobile app

Want this also. No Windows available here at home nor at work.
Thanks All

I'm also a Linux only PC user but have concluded that l have two options. One is a Windows Virtualbox environment using an old Windows OS (e.g. XP, Vista) that I own. My concern with this option is the reliability of the VM's USB connection. I have used it successfully to update firmware on a TV remote but would be more cautious in an activity which may brick an expensive device.
The more reliable option is to use a USB Hard drive bay and an old unused 30-40GB hard drive (Sata or IDE) or a 32-64GB bootable USB flash drive to install a Windows OS and boot off it just when up need Odin or KIES 3.
All of my research and reading conclude that Heidelberg and/or the Java alternative combined with recent Samsung devices are not ready yet so these other options are safer and faster to set up and use at this time.
If you do not presently have a copy of a Windows OS you likely can find a friend who has a old unused XP CD lying around.
Up to a week ago when I bought my Tab S I only had Nexus devices (10 and 5) so their Linux ADB capability made any firmware changes a breeze. Too bad Google does not enforcement ADB as a standard. Let OEM's put out their own KIES equivalents, as much of that functionality can be worked around anyway (e.g. network shares).
Sent from my SM-T800 using XDA Premium HD app

3DSammy said:
I'm also a Linux only PC user but have concluded that l have two options. One is a Windows Virtualbox environment using an old Windows OS (e.g. XP, Vista) that I own. My concern with this option is the reliability of the VM's USB connection. I have used it successfully to update firmware on a TV remote but would be more cautious in an activity which may brick an expensive device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The way I understand it (I might be horribly wrong is that you should be ok if all you're going to do is to flash a custom recovery, not an entire ROM since only the recovery partition would be affected.
If you do not presently have a copy of a Windows OS you likely can find a friend who has a old unused XP CD lying around.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are actually legal ways of downloading Windows for free. One is to download a copy from Microsoft itself. Google for "Windows evaluation copy". This will get you a perfectly free copy of Windows 8.1. The only catch, besides the need to register and give some personal info, is that your Windows installation will time out after 30 days, which should be more than enough time to flash a custom recovery onto your Android device.
I've also heard of a probably legal way to download a copy of Windows 7 from a licensed online distributor. This was supposed to be a backup copy of the OEM version (for those who lost or damaged their Windows installer), which needs to be activated with a valid key. However, you can run your Windows install without activation also for 30 days.
Speaking of legal, I'm actually more concerned about the legality of Odin. Does anybody have any idea who authored the software?

Odin is samsungs official software.

Microsoft also has VM images for download, which are meant for testing Internet Explorer versions... They also have limited lifetime, but if you want a VM it's a faster option.
Too lazy to Google for the url, cause I'm on the phone and all
EDIT: http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/

Real or virtual Windows is the only way to go. Heimdall or anything that uses its code doesn't work on the tab s.

fred_be9300 said:
Microsoft also has VM images for download, which are meant for testing Internet Explorer versions... They also have limited lifetime, but if you want a VM it's a faster option.
Too lazy to Google for the url, cause I'm on the phone and all
EDIT: http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seems to be the better option if you don't want to bother with the process of virtual disk setup and OS installation. Like you said it's also a much smaller download if you choose the IE6 on XP VM (1GB vs. the 3GB+ needed for Windows 7/8). But does the VM copy actually provide USB access? I'm asking because I usually use KVM/QEMU rather than VirtualBox, which is quite hard to set up from the command line compared to KVM.

Gondwanaland said:
But does the VM copy actually provide USB access?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know. I guess that's depends more on the features of the VM player software (VMware, kvm, VirtualBox, ..) than on the VM. I've never tried using USB within a VM.

fred_be9300 said:
I don't know. I guess that's depends more on the features of the VM player software (VMware, kvm, VirtualBox, ..) than on the VM. I've never tried using USB within a VM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
USB's working fine. I just checked with the IE8 on WinXP image for Virtualbox, which I ran under KVM! Tip for KVM users the zip archive contains a file with an .ova extension. This appears to be a standard Unix tar archive that in turn contains two files with .vdmk and .ovf extensions. The .vdmk file is the Virtualbox image that you can run through KVM in read-only mode. If you want to save changes, you need to convert the image to KVM's native qcow2 format. Note: I only tested if Odin can recognize a Samsung device is connected. I haven't actually tried flashing an image, yet.

Gondwanaland said:
... Note: I only tested if Odin can recognize a Samsung device is connected. I haven't actually tried flashing an image, yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you attempt to flash please post your results either way, thanks.
Sent from my SM-T800 using XDA Premium HD app

Successful Odin flashing from a Virtualbox VM
I have successfully flashed Samsung stock firmware to a SM-T800 from a Virtualbox Windows 7 VM guest with Odin v3.10 and a Ubuntu 14.04 host. The guide is general to Windows VMs. I set up both an XP and Windows 7 which had both KIES3 and Odin v3.10 access to the SM-T800 but only flashed with the Win7 VM.
[How-To] Linux, Virtualbox and ODIN for your Samsung device
Also I rooted without tripping KNOX using this guide:
[GUIDE] How to root without tripping knox - Kitkat and Lollipop, Locked bootloader

It's also quite easy to create a bootable version of Windows on a usb drive.

Use Heimdall, worked for me
lucasavalos said:
Just want to flash TWRP and root sm-t700 using linux anyone tried this?
Sent from my Moto G using XDA Free mobile app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just installed TWRP 3.1.1; then Lineage 14.1
Here's my setup:
Target: SM-T700
Workstation: Arch Linux, system update 2011-11-11
Heimdall 1.4.2
Run heimdall command line as root, one command per boot works and if I got an error I needed to unplug the battery to get another successful command
Try
Code:
#heimdall print-pit
and if that works and reboots your device then
Code:
#heimdall flash --RECOVERY twrp-3.1.1-0-klimtwifi.img --no-reboot
Then unplug the battery, boot straight to recovery; failing recovery boot on first try overwrites your TWRP recovery image.
Good luck!

Unplug the battery? On a T700? Interesting lol.

Linux on non-rooted zuk z2 didn't work ?

i wanted to install linux on my device [zuk z2 plus (zui 3.5 Android 8.0)]
i tried Linux deploy but it tells me that i need to root my device
so i searched for another way and i found some apps:
First Limbo pc emulator)
i tried it by downloaing linux img but it's completely slow
slow in running , slow in installing , even slow in live install
and almost it makes error in installing software
Second: Debian noroot
i thought by the name it will work with me
and i think that Debian is a kind of linux
so i tried it and it didn't work with me , It is worth to be mentioned that I tried it on (Sam note 4) and it work so good!
i don't know is the problem in my Android version or in my device or what?
Finally : Gnuroot Debian
it even didn't open with me
but in (Sam note 4):
it open a black screen because i think it was a terminal emulator and i tried to link it with X server but it didn't work.
i know that the reason why Gnuroot didn't work with me is my Android version ?
anyone can help?