Post date: Jun 28, 2014 8:02:13 PM
Turns out that an Android tablet (actually any phone) can be made into an actually-useful full-fledged Linux workstation, without rooting it.
By actually-useful, I mean something that a power-user will be able to use. By power-user, I mean roughly somebody who does most of his work in the command line and/or editors, but in a graphical environment.
There is no way around the fact that GUI-based tools developed for a desktop system will be unusable on touch interfaces. For one, UI elements are simply too many and too close together.
Command-line tools are quite another story. Lots of scientific and development workflows rely on some form of console or editor, plus an occasional preview - say a plot, or rendered LaTeX output. The key here is the ability to easily switch windows, and that they appear with sensible defaults that don’t force us to rearrange them every time.
GNURoot allows one to install and run essentially any open-source package, pre-built for the arm architecture, courtesy of the Debian or Fedora distributions, via the distributions’ package management (yum or apt-get).
GNURoot provides a text only interface and some bootstrapped distributions, which are run in a sandboxed environment. I am using the Debian wheezy distribution.
There are several X servers on Google Play (not counting VNC viewers) but none beats XServer XSDL :
You definitely want a hardware keyboard - either an USB one (they are very cheap), or a Bluetooth one.
The keyword here is usability. One wants a system on which it is actually possible to work, not a gimmick.
If you don’t have a wireless mouse, get the i3 tiling window manager . It’s reasonably easy to learn (the introduction video says it all) and comes with sensible defaults.
The reason i3 is a good match for the tablet is that
I have not checked the usability of a “traditional” WM with an hardware mouse.
DISPLAY=:0 i3I would recommend the following
/home/.bashrc)