I know some of you geeks have already done something like that, running a GNU/Linux distribution on top of an Android device. It’s an interesting time, with projects like proot we don’t need root privilege on our Android devices to run a containerized Linux environment. Here in this post, I’ve written down the steps that I’ve taken to have a usable desktop environment up running on my Galaxy Tab S5e (this blog post has been written up purely within such environment).
Category: Linux
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Fedora Linux with MATE Desktop on Android
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来份Brunch笔电瞬间变身Chromebook
自从几年前卖掉华硕的一台小Chromebook后，看到Android和Linux应用程式的支持增加，又开始有点馋涎Chromebook……不过因为今年疫情全球大爆发，电子产品（尤其是适合居家办公和学习的）价格一路上扬（或者缺货）。Chromebook今年出货量增长更是迅猛（Windows PC, MacBook, Chromebook分类中增长幅度最大）。问我这台2015年买的老笔电尚能饭否？答曰：Brunch。
出厂预装的Windows 10早被我卸载干净了，单Linux系统（OpenSUSE）用了有一年多了，看到Brunch这个项目能在自己笔电上体验Chrome OS变身Chromebook，赶紧试验了一把，没想到效果出奇地好！这里特意用中文记载一下Linux下安装Chrome OS和后续升级的办法以供中文网络世界的朋友参考。
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Building Linux Kernel on Odroid-U3
This is the year 2020, Odroid-U3 is far from a powerful ARM development board in today’s standard, but it is still more than capable! Quad-core ARMv7 CPU and 2GB RAM, which means I can still run some light services and test my toy projects without paying any fees to AWS or Azure. The year 2020 also means that this little device can be powered by the mainline Linux kernel without many troubles (if any)! Better than that, the process is ridiculously straightforward!
In this post, I put together the steps I did to build the Linux kernel using upstream mainline source code natively on Odroid-U3. If you’re interested in cross-building from your x86 machines, you can find plenty of tutorials on that on the Internet.
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Virtual Linux Desktop Experience in Azure
I wouldn’t believe that I will be writing this 10 years ago. It’s 2020 though. Microsoft has improved a lot of services for Linux, ranging from developer tools like Visual Studio Code, to the protagonist today: Azure (cloud computing). Azure has steadfastly become a real credible alternative to Amazon EC2 (or AWS in general). Today, I want to share my experience of using a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure cloud. To be more specific, it is a Linux desktop virtual machine (SLES 15).
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Announcing YapStocks 2.0
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a new plasmoid (KDE Plasma Applet) that provides a simple interface to monitor stocks. The first version was rather basic, being able to show the current market price only. Now it’s time to announce the availability of the second iteration of YapStocks (Yet Another Plasma Stocks Applet). I’ve recorded a short video clip showcasing all the features it has, ranging from the information summary to the historical price chart.
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Hands-on Sailfish OS on Redmi Note 7
Not sure if this is related to the COVID-19 lockdown, but we’ve seen a lot of geeky hobby projects coming up recently. A lot of community ports have been done over the last few months for niche mobile operating systems such as Sailfish OS. That’s exactly the one I played with briefly after purchasing a second-hand Redmi Note 7 on eBay (don’t ask me if I think it’s a waste of money now LOL).
If you come here hoping to find the resources, head to the GitHub repo directly where you can find the ROMs to download.
Make sure that you’ve unlocked the bootloader already! If not, you need to register a MI account and apply for unlocking here. You must log in to your MI account on both the unlocking tool and your phone (MI, POCO, RedMi). If you don’t have a Windows PC, I recommend using XiaoMiTool V2 which works on macOS, Linux, as well as Windows. Though I couldn’t find this on the official FAQ, you have to have a working SIM card inserted. You have to use the mobile data instead of WiFi when unlocking the bootloader on your phone because XiaoMi is doing some verification.
Another problem I encountered was that in fastboot mode, RedMi Note 7 would just say “Press any key to reboot” when any commands are sent from my laptop. After googling on this, there seems to be a driver bug that makes RedMi Note 7 fastboot USB3 unfriendly. Using a USB-Hub worked for most people, including me 🤷.
I wish you all a successful attempt to flash Sailfish OS into your RedMi Note 7. Here are some screenshots I took.
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OpenSUSE 15.1 Installation Notes
Although my personal laptop isn’t getting much attention from me because I’ve spent most of my time on my work laptop (a MacBook Pro) and my Android tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e), I’ve decided to take good care of its software over last weekend by wiping the SSD clean and installing a fresh OpenSUSE on it. As an old habit, I’m sharing some notes during the installation and later setup. This is, however, the first blog post written in English here (not counting the old ones on no-long-working en.librehat.com).
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适用于KDE Plasma 5的雅虎天气小部件
去年简单粗暴地把自己写的Yahoo! Weather从KDE 4移植到了Plasma 5，但是一直没有好好改进一下。前段时间雅虎停止旧API支持，被迫更新，就顺便改改了。应该访客里有不少KDE的用户吧，想要一个简单的天气小部件的可以试试看。
主要卖点
- 纯QML，不用编译直接装
- 雅虎天气接口，大品牌
值得信赖 - 自认还算简洁明了的UI
- 支持不同的计量单位（温度、气压、风速等）
- 10天天气预报
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在华硕Chromebook C201上安装Debian Jessie
网上有不少在Chromebook上安装Linux的脚本了，不过我个人还是比较偏向于手动一步步执行，天知道脚本是不是已经太老了或者某些具体情况不匹配。希望本文一来能对各位想要安装Linux的Chromebook持有者有所裨益，二来就和博客里其他文章一样，当作个人的备忘。另外需要说明的是安装Debian算是比较繁琐的，如果想要安装Arch的话，戳底下参考文章的链接，安装Arch可以很快就搞定（而且是在Chromebook上就能全部搞定）。至于为什么不安装我钟爱的Fedora，因为我个人感觉Fedora的ARM做得不是很好，担心出岔子。好了，废话不多说了，下面开始正文。