sábado, 28 de diciembre de 2013

GNURooting Android on a ZaTab ZT2

Little by little, I am learning how to use my ZaTab ZT2 the way I want.
I think I managed to handle Android, but I want to push my limits and learn to do what most people won't do with their Android device.  Why following everyone's path if one can make one's own path?  True, this path may lead me to my doom, but walking it will be more interesting than staying in the comfort zone without learning anything new.

Thus, I am set to booting Linux (another distro, that is, if you count Android as a penguin) on my ZT2.  I have absolutely no idea how to do it, but I'm determined to figure it out.

Thus, in the meantime, and as a learning exercise, I used GNURoot to expand my Android horizons.

GNURoot is not a rooting tool, to begin with.  But it does give you some interesting ideas on how to proceed if you want to boot several GNU/Linux distros: Aborigin, Debian Wheezy, or Fedora.

Well, although I took a Fedora-based course online, I chose Wheezy because the download was smaller.  I didn't want to wait for a long download just for the sake of experimenting.

What did I get?

Yay!  A Linux console, alright.  That's Wheezy without a GUI.  Cute, isn't it?  The best part is the # telling you something that means the Promised Land, right?  I felt encouraged by that and tried an apt-get update.  Could I access Wheezy's repositories?  YES!  I could!  Apt-get works, as advertised.

What should my next move be?
I thought about installing something light, like Abiword.  But that wasn't light at all.  All dependencies included, my download soared the 200 MB.  Too much for this first test.

 I thus knew what to try.  Quickly, I typed "apt-get install sl."  That's a very small, must-have application, after all.  Surely enough, Apt did its thing and installed sl.


It was time for the last stage of my experiment: testing sl.  If sl worked, it would mean I was indeed using Linux.  I then typed "sl" and...
THERE YOU GO!  THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE OF SUCCESS IS ALIVE!!!!

For my next experiment, I'll try downloading and running something more complex, maybe a GUI.  But that will have to wait until I recover from this X-mas flu.

2 comentarios:

  1. Congratulations!

    Your success encourages me to try. But I must also recover from the flu...

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    Respuestas
    1. You can call that a very moderate success. Yeah, this flu is terrible! I think it is the virus itself the one that is writing my current short story, by the way.

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