Now that you can run commands as root on the Google phone, you may have been thinking about what else you can do with the device. You know, besides the usual talking, texting, and surfing while driving.
The device is Linux based, sure, but the installed software is relatively spartan and there isn’t too much internal space to get dangerous. Thankfully, Jay Freeman wrote a nice guide for installing a more complete Linux distribution on the device, right alongside Android.
The main thing I’ve so far seen on this matter have been a few attempts to get busybox on there. I, however, think we can go a lot further: following the instructions in this article will end you up with a full distribution of Debian, one of the most highly respected Linux distributions, and the ability to install almost anything you want.
To do this, we need to think through a few of the details of getting this sort of thing running on the G1. The first question: where do we put it? The device has some internal flash, but it isn’t really enough: only 128MB to share with the OS and other applications.
We therefore turn our attention to the much more reasonably sized microSD card, a format which lets us get up to 16GB of space.
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