Debian gets ported to the G1, makes nice with Android

by Donald Melanson, posted Nov 10th 2008 at 12:06PM

Recent firmware updates may have aimed to shut down such shenanigans, but it looks they were a little too slow to stop Jay Freeman (a.k.a. Saurik) from going to town with his newly jailbroken G1 and installing Debian on the handset. What's more, he apparently even managed to get Debian and Android to play nice with each other, letting you have a completely normal and unassuming phone by day and a nerd machine by night. As you might expect, however, it's not exactly as simple as installing an app from the Android Market, but anyone with a little experience in installing Linux distributions on unconventional devices should be able to follow the instructions fairly easily, although actually turning it into something useful is another matter. Hit up the read link below to get started.

[Via ModMyGphone]

Filed under: Handsets, Software, Android

Tags: android, debian, g1, google, linux, t-mobile

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Jay Freeman (saurik) @ Nov 11th 2008 1:11AM

I am, in fact, working on making it /almost/ as easy as installing an application from the Market ;P. It won't be "as easy" as this type of thing requires root access, but there will be a single, self contained program, that will perform the installation (and even do it in a way that repartitions your SD card rather than putting it all into a file, so that it doesn't disrupt your ability to use the USB mounting functionality while you are using it) ;P.

Neutral

phs @ Nov 12th 2008 6:27PM

Nice job Jay - keep up the great work!

There are at least a few of us out here that continue to hope for truly open mobile computing/communications platforms. The Apple/MS options are simply unacceptable for users who want to use the devices they bought the way they want to. At least the Android platform offers some hope for consumer freedom. Once there are better mechanisms on Android so that sensitive customer/corporate data doesn't have to end up on Google's servers, Android could become an even more viable option to the non-lemming crowd. Being able to also boot into a nice Linux distro like Debian makes it even better.

-- phs

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