[Galaxy Tab Pro 12.2, 10.1, 8.4 Q&A, Help & Trouble] linuxuberalles:
Here's a summary of my (bad) luck with LinuxOnAndroid,

GNURoot, and LinuxDeploy on a ChainFire rooted

(CF-Auto-Root-mondrianwifi-mondrianwifixx-smt320)

Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4" (SM-T320 KitKat) tablet.

I'm new to Android and XDAdevelopers. My goal is to have

a GNU/Linux ARM development environment on Android

so that I can experiment with porting my C signal processing

algorithm software and X/OpenGL display tools to a tablet.

I also want to see what it can do in terms of "computing"

(number-crunching); I'm not expecting greatness, but

perhaps goodness.

I would greatly appreciate any help that anyone can provide

me to overcome the obstacles I'm encountering - including my

own ignorance. In the Android world, it seems that problems

are not "portable"; they're specific to a device and/or vendor.

While general advice is welcome, that which is specific to the

SM-T320 would be most helpful.

LinuxOnAndroid

LinuxOnAndroid was my first choice because, after much pain,

I got it working on my Droid Razr-M smart phone (Android 4.2.x

JellyBean). On the phone it had several problems: 1) the

bootscript.sh was defective (required much editing);

2) the LARGE (only 4GB) Fedora 19 image is too small to be

useful; 3) the phone is computationally challenged;

4) the phone is display and keyboard challenged. Hunting

on the LinuxOnAndroid website reveals that the Fedora 19

image can be resized fairly easily; I enlarged mine to 16GB.

After much avaricious lusting for a good price ($250), the

quad-core Snapdragon 2.5GHz Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 with

16GB internal and an added 64GB external SD card became

attractive for experimentation. While the hardware limitations

are, presumable/hopefully alleviated, Android 4.4.x (KitKat)

seems to be challenged in new and different ways. In particular,

you can't use ext4 formatting on the external SD card. Google

(and/or Samsung) apparently considers paying royalties to

Microsoft for exfat (with its defective everything-is-executable

permissions) to be preferable to using superior extN formats.

So much so that they effectively prohibit one from using ext4

on the SD card - even though the Android system itself uses it.

WTF?!?!?!?! Defaulting to exfat is fine, but prohibiting/impeding

extN is unacceptable.

Consequently, I put the expanded LinuxOnAndroid Fedora 19 ISO

image on the exfat SD card, and since that image is formatted

internally for ext4, I hoped that Fedora on Android would not

be damaged goods. I pointed LinuxOnAndroid to the

fedora-19.HUGE.ext4.v3.img image I put in directory

/storage/extSdCard/linuxonandroid/fedora-19.HUGE.ext4.v3.

Unfortunately, there seem to be other things that make

LinuxOnAndroid fail for me. Installation puts things in

/data/data/com.zpwebsite.linuxonandroid/files. The

bootscript.sh it loads there doesn't work for me. Despite being

updated from the version that I tried on my phone, it seems

to be incompatible with KitKat 4.4.x. I spent considerable

time googling for a solution and editing the file, but to

no avail; Fedora 19 will not boot. Changes include adding

lines to turn selinux off/on, adding explicit "su" before

mkdir and mount commands, and adding references to

/storage/extSdCard. Complaints about the loop device

not existing went away, but repeated attempts to start

LinuxOnAndroid without a reboot of the android

device fail because the loop device remains in use. Currently

there is an error creating etc/resolv.conf because an

earlier mount fails. (I attached a screenshot of the errors.,

booterrors.jpg.) I have eased permissions (to 775 from 755)

in the ISO image file for root and root/cfg since the complaints

refer to $mnt/root/cfg. Also attached is my edited

bootscript.sh(.txt) which doesn't work.

DeployLinux

Deploylinux looks slick and installation appears to be highly

configurable, with support for many flavors of Linux. It

looks like you should be able to point it to

/storage/extSdCard/linuxdeploy/linux.img (I created the

directory) for installation. Unfortunately it can't even create

the installation image file linux.img. Googling this problem

reveals that it is widespread. Some kind of protections (they

look fine) and/or KitKat problem? Who knows. Everyone seems

to have trouble, and no answers are forthcoming.

GNURoot

In some ways, GNUroot looks the most promising of the trio.

First, it does not require the tablet to be rooted. Initially,

I installed the Fedora Remix. Installation was very simple

and also successful. Unfortunately, this seems to be an

ancient version of Fedora. "uname -a" reveals no information

about what version it is (16, 17, 18, 19, 20 ???). "yum update"

fails - perhaps because it is such an old version that there

are no longer any repos available for it. This is very

unfortunate for me, because I vastly prefer Fedora to

Debian-based Linux. (I dislike apt-get, apt-cache and dpkg

intensely; give me rpm and yum any day.)

Next I tried installing the WheezyX Remix. That, too installed

easily and successfully. In this case, "apt-get upgrade" and

"apt-get update" worked fine, and "apt-get install 'xfce4*'"

spent hours installing around 2000 new packages (many of which

didn't seem to have anything to do with XFCE, though useful).

The problem here is that I could never make it do anything

X-related. VNC Viewer would not connect to it. Furthermore,

WheezyX doesn't clean up after itself. Every time I tried it,

I had to use localhost:N+1 in VNC Viewer, where N keeps growing.

Manually cleaning up the lock files is annoying. At least this

provides a functioning Linux, but a only in the sense of a

console "window". I also could not make autofs work to mount

my assortment of home Linux workstations as /net/machinexyz;

perhaps it works (or is configured) differently than in Fedora.

Bottom Line

I appreciate the hard work of the developers of LinuxOnAndroid,

LinuxDeploy and GNURoot. I'm frustrated to be so close to, yet

so far from having a full-up Linux running on my "hot" tablet. I

really would like to be able to have a full-up Linux development

environment on ARM via Android, and begin porting some of my

signal processing software to it.

I would appreciate any help anyone can provide to help me reach

this goal. So far my experience with my new tablet has been

restricted to mindless media consumption, which is not why I

spent $250 on it.

So far, I am disappointed that Samsung and/or Google have,

in my opinion, removed the Linux goodness on which Android

is based. Apparently Richard Stallman is correct: GNU is the

heart of Linux - LiGNUx.

TIA!