[Android General] hammmy:
I have used this thread to install Archlinux using LinuxonAndroid on a Samsung Epic 4G's SD card. I have some issues to sort out with using VNC to access the Archlinux installation but the commandline environment on the Epic 4G works fine.

If you're trying to use this with Ubuntu, there are several issues. First, the image hosted by the LoA project for Ubuntu 13.10 doesn't work for this application: you'll get errors when you try to mount the image for installation to the SD partition. Second, you might try the 13.04 image: it will mount and install but the repositories are all gone because 13.04 is no longer supported.

If you're trying to install this in order to use a specific program (in my case, I'm wanting to use this device as a Prosody server), it's probably best to see which available distro hosted by LoA has up-to-date packages for that program and use that to guide your decision. Based on this logic, I chose Archlinux.

If you aren't using Ubuntu, the bootscript.sh file included with this post becomes problematic as it is littered with Ubuntu-specific calls. It isn't overly difficult to edit: open it in Notepad+ (or similar) and read through it, changing $mnt and $ubuntu to whatever you've named your partition mount folder as. In my case, my mount folder is /archlinux/ and the fake image file (used to spoof the LoA app as detailed in OP's post) is /archlinux/archlinux.img, so this meant simply replacing $mnt and $ubuntu with $archlinux. There are a few instances of $ubuntu that I didn't mess with--in the comments, David has mentioned that they refer to the "usermounts feature" and that he left these alone because he didn't understand it. Are these the usermounts that are defined in the LoA app? I don't know and I haven't tried defining a mount yet (such as partition 1 on the SD card). In short, bootscript.sh will need to be edited to account for a non-Ubuntu installation.

(If you're using Archlinux, LoA hosts a modified bootscript.sh that contains a Archlinux-specific change to mounting /dev/pts, whatever that is. I used this as a base script to work with, then added and deleted the areas that David has edited in his bootscript.sh.)

Accounting for the differences, Archlinux works at the terminal on the device. However, if you try to connect to the automatically configured VNC server, things start to get weird for a Linux noob (which I am). For starters, there isn't a desktop environment defined so when you first connect, you're gonna see a blank gray screen and a cursor. Right-clicking brings up a menu. Almost none of the apps on the menu work, because they aren't installed. I think what you're looking at is the openbox window environment. What you need is a terminal to install something that works better but here's the catch: the terminal isn't installed/working, either (in VNC, not at the device). What I did here might have been a mistake compounding an error: I used the terminal on the device (which is logged in as root) to install a desktop environment using Archlinux's package manager, pacman. Then, I edited the (hidden by default) /home/$yourinstallhere/.vnc/xstartup.sh to boot the installed desktop environment; add a line with the command appropriate to your chosen DE: e.g. gnome-session; startxfce4; startlxde. You can comment out most anything else as those lines are loading the openbox environment and a terminal session. Alternatively, leave those in place as a backup environment and place your DE load command after those, so if your DE doesn't load, you still have the nearly useless gray screen to look at.

Okay, so that got a DE going (after the xstartup script was executed again and possibly the Linux install rebooted). Now what? Well, as mentioned before, terminal still doesn't work. It will open but there isn't a prompt and no keyboard input is shown. Without terminal, Linux is crippled, DE or no DE. This is where I am currently. I can still manage the Archlinux installation from the device's terminal as root but access from VNC is effectively unusable. I don't know why: is it because the DE packages (including a terminal emulator) were installed by root and therefore the VNC user doesn't have the permissions to access them?

In any event, I would like to thank David for posting this thread. The LoA project has little to no documentation or discussion so this has been very helpful to me. Please let me know if you have any ideas regarding VNC access of the installation.

Edit: Additional installation-specific information:

My Epic 4G is running the Cyanogenmod 10.1 stable release. The init.d mount script for the second partition will not automatically run at boot, despite CM supporting init.d and having installed the Universal init.d app. However, the script can be manually executed from within the Universal app and that will mount the partition. I tried adding a 50-second sleep to the script to see if it was just bogging down but that had no effect so I gave that idea up. The test script that the Universal app uses to test if the device has init.d support also doesn't work, which indicates that the Epic 4G CM port may be at fault here.

Using Archlinux's systemctl to manage services from the root terminal on the device is not working as expected. For instance, if I try to restart the vncserver service (systemctl restart vncserver) the terminal returns, "Running in chroot, ignoring request."

Edit #2:

Installed xterm from the device terminal and now I can access xterm from VNC /facepalm (why does the xstartup script call something that isn't installed by default?).