Debian/LXDE running on Acer Iconia A500 tab

I got a chance to have this tablet for sometime, and since then I have been hacking it. The first thing to do is most obvious, to root the device. I have reloaded the tablet with Taboonay's ROM (1.1) based on the Android Honeycomb 3.1 stock ROM. It has it's cool features, about which you can read here.

And thanks to lanrat for an article about this.

*** Do this if you fully understand what you are doing***

Now over to getting Debian on to the tablet. 

Your device should be rooted. You need some free space on the SD card, about 1 GB is sufficient for this. Secondly you have to prepare a base installer image of Debian, I did this on Ubuntu 11.04. If you do not have a Linux box don't sweat it, get Linux on a pen drive and boot from that. And you need the Android terminal, also set it up such that your $PATH variable has /system/xbin in the beginning. For installing/configuring LXDE you need to have a mouse and keyboard connected to your tablet (I used an old bluetooth keyboard and mouse from Logitech EX100).

Once you are in Ubuntu open a terminal and do the following to create the base image -

sudo -s

apt-get install debootstrap

dd if=/dev/zero of=debian.img seek=1073741824 bs=1 count=1 # I use 1 GB image size **

mke2fs -F debian.img

mkdir debian

mount -o loop debian.img debian/

debootstrap --verbose --arch armel --foreign lenny debian http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian

umount debian/

rm -r debian/

** you can use lesser image size (800 MB) if you do not want to install LXDE.

With that you have a Debian base installer image. Now download this chroot script, which will be used to set up environment to run Debian (save this file as bootdebian). Copy this image and the chroot script to the SD card, such that it lays in 

/mnt/external_sd

Now put back the SD card into the tablet and power on. Following commands will make the chroot script

executable in Android terminal and turn it into a command, open Android terminal on the tablet and type -

su

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mmcblk0p3 /system

cat /mnt/external_sd/bootdebian > /system/xbin/bootdebian

dos2unix /system/xbin/bootdebian

rm /mnt/external_sd/bootdebian

chmod 777 /system/xbin/bootdebian

With that done, you have a command 'bootdebian' which can be run to set up to run Debian. 

After this you need to complete the Debian install, for that run the following commands on the Android terminal - 

bootdebian

/debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage

echo 'deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian lenny main' >/etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get autoclean

apt-get update

exit

This completes the Debian install. From now on if you want to work on a real Linux box, you just have to ope n the Android terminal and run 'bootdebian'.

Now, commands for installing LXDE -

bootdebian

apt-get install xdm # this downloads ~30 MB

apt-get install lxde # this downloads ~100 MB, so you can 'take wakelock' the terminal & go for a walk

Once the apt-get completes the installations, it starts configuring the LXDE. This is the time you need your hardware keyboard (if not mouse) when it asks for some settings. Look for the place where it asks for which display manager and select 'xdm'.

Next you need to install the tightvncserver so as to create vnc session. For that, run 

apt-get install tightvncserver

Once done with that, you can start the session with these commands -

export USER=root

vncserver -geometry 1280x736 -depth 16

Above command will ask you for setting up passwords. This creates a session on localhost:1, which is a basic desktop. To start LXDE in the session, you have to instruct the vncserver using the xstartup script. For doing this, run the following commands -

vncserver -kill :1  # first kill the running session

vi /root/.vnc/xstartup

This opens the vi editor loaded with the vncserver's start up script. Edit this script such that it looks something like this -

#!/bin/sh

xrdb $HOME/.Xresources

xsetroot -solid grey

#x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &

#x-window-manager &

#/etc/X11/Xsession

startlxde

Save the file and close. Start the VNC session.

To view the session, you can either use the AndroidVNC application on your tablet or any VNC viewer on your PC.

This ends!