Debian on Haipad? Is it possible?

[OffWorld]

I've seen some Android phones and a couple tablets that have been hacked to run either Debian, Ubuntu, or SUSE, it seems usually as chroot rather than booting directly so rooting is necessary I suppose.

My question is, has anyone been able to run a desktop Linux distro on the Haipad M701/701-R (or any of it's other names/models)? Or for that matter, has anyone looked at booting BSD flavors that have been ported to the ARM architecture?

I'm guessing it's more complicated than just putting a "live" image (loopback fs) on an SD card or Flash drive and rebooting, or everyone would be doing it.

But is getting another OS to run on these tablets so difficult and hardware specific it's hardly worth the effort, at least so long as the manufacturer seems willing to release firmware updates?

 

[goldshirt9]

interesting question.
couldnt you run a live o/s from a memory stick on the tablet
puppy / damn small linux easier

 

[OffWorld]

I downloaded someone else's Debian port for Android, intended to run from chroot so it doesn't replace or mess with the Android install. It's only 750 MB so it should work even with smaller MicroSD cards. I just unzipped it and moved the "debian" folder to the root of my /sdcard/ then cd into it via the terminal.

The "installer.sh" script wouldn't run and when I tried typing in the commands manually my terminal app would periodically crash (maybe I need to find a better one?). So I connected via adb and ran the commands from there which worked to create the necessary directory, push files into /system/bin/, and chmod things.

When I run the "bootdeb" command I DO actually see the ASCII art penguin in the terminal and very quickly it starts doing the verbose startup, can't find something or things (it rolls past so fast I can't read it), exits, and then automatically reboots the tablet. Guess I'll have to look for a log file or something to figure out why it won't run, but it's encouraging that I can actually see Debian stuff in the window. Hopefully I can figure out what parts it's looking for and can't find and then put them on the tablet to get this running. If anyone else wants to download the same build and give it a shot, please do. More brains working on it is better!