Fedora on Android

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 17:03 -0700, Les Howell wrote:
> Hi, guys,
>       I created a new UI for GRBL using Python with tkinter.  Not 
> bad, but it
> won't work on an Android Notepad (GX10 from a company called EKEN),
> which was my target.  Quit laughing, I know every one of you has had
> some similar experience where a language wouldn't port someplace...
>       
>       Anyway, I had seen some reports of Fedora on Android.  I 
> have been
> searching for over an hour and cannot for the life of me find Fedora 
> for
> Android.  I have seen links to various apps that will sort of be 
> linux,
> and some that have some functionality, but reading the reviews has 
> left
> me wondering if my favorite group of developers has given up on these
> little useful devices?  Looking at the new Fedora offerings, I get
> Workstation, Server, and Cloud.  But I could not for the life of me
> figure out which would work on Android A20 processors??
> 
>       Please Help.  This little pad has but one destination, 
> driving my own
> milling machine, so rooting it is definitely an option, but I would
> prefer if there were some way to boot from the SD card with linux to
> verify that it works first.  Just to keep it simple...
> 
>       Can someone please point me in a good direction to start.

"Fedora on Android" is not really a thing, because Android is an OS
and Fedora is an OS.

Devices that run Android out of the box *tend* to be based on ARM
processors. ARM is a primary arch for Fedora, but support for tablet
hardware is not much of a priority, Fedora ARM is aimed more at 'dev
board' platforms like the Beaglebone and Pandaboard. I don't believe
there are any builds of Fedora that will boot out of the box on any
typical mass-market tablet devices. 32-bit ARM is a somewhat different
world from x86, where you can take a generic image and boot it on most
any system, because there isn't sufficient standardization at the
firmware and bootloader level. Distros need specific customization for
each target device.

Basically, I'm afraid this isn't likely to work out for you :/ There
is some community work on doing Ubuntu builds for tablet hardware, but
your device looks somewhat obscure and I doubt there'd be anyone
working on it. Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I'd probably be
looking to pick up some different hardware; perhaps a cheap x86
Chromebook would fit the bill. I wouldn't recommend a Baytrail-based
one, though (or any other Baytrail-based anything). The HP Chromebook
11 or Acer C720P might be good choices - someone wrote up Fedora on
the C720P last year: 
http://blog.sergiodj.net/post/2014-09-26-fedora-on-acer-c720p/
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net