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I have a Debian chroot on my Huawei u8120 ( Joy / Ascend / Vodafone 845) that otherwise runs Android but I want to do more with Debian. This is my story.

In the beginning, the phone was rooted, and and a Debian chroot set up.

To start Debian, I open a terminal and invoke /data/local/bin/d. I don't type that whole path using an on-screen keyboard because /data/local/bin is on the $PATH. d invokes /usr/local/sbin/boot inside the Debian chroot. Then I have to SSH in and work quickly or the Android OOM will kill the SSH session. Once in, I telnet localhost to get from the Debian chroot to Android and then invoke android off, which shuts down zygote and SystemServer, freeing RAM for Debian and preventing Android from pre-loading apps.

At the moment, I manually:

rm /system/bin/netd /system/bin/mediaserver

..to prevent servicemanager from continually restarting them. This whole process definitely needs polish but it works.

MPD makes it easy to roll your own UI for a music player. I want the same for my phone, so I need to find out to drive the hardware.