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 * Set CPU to 710 MHz with the ''performance'' governor. YMMV  * Set CPU to 710 MHz with the ''interactiveX'' governor. YMMV

Installing a Debian chroot on Android

This is an account of installing vanilla full-fat Debian squeeze in a chroot on Android.

This was tested on a Vodafone 845 ( a re-branded HuaWei u8120 / Joy / Ascend).

  • First, the phone was rooted by side-loading z4root

  • CyanogenMod 7.2.0-RC0 22b was flashed. This might not be necessary though

  • Set CPU to 710 MHz with the interactiveX governor. YMMV

  • Side-loaded SSHDroid
  • The SD card was formatted with the MBR scheme and a single ext3 partition was created. 15 sectors were left over

Then, on a workstation ( any architecture), insert the µSD card, and: 

  sudo debootstrap --arch=armel --variant=minbase --foreign  squeeze  /media/PHONE\ CARD/squeeze  http://mirror.local:9999/debian

Then remove the µSD card and replace it in the phone, start SSHDroid and SSH to the phone, then: 

  mount -o remount,exec,dev /mnt/sdcard/
  chroot /mnt/sdcard/squeeze/  /bin/bash -l
  debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage

Then build up the Debian system as you normally would a minimal installation.

Many thanks to all the people whose hard work made it so trivial for me to install the environment I know and love on my phone.

Available memory

Android pre-loads applications ( in some case that the user has never started) when there is free memory. This reduces the memory available to applications in a chroot.

It looks like the *_MEM properties in /init.rc along with the /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/minfree might help.