A month ago, I showed you in my article CAP in the pocket: Developing Java Applications on your Phone (a more concise version), how to run a CAP development environment on your phone. In this week’s short blog post, I use a different angle. I wanted to see whether I could run SAP’s Garden Linux on my phone.

If you’re waiting for my CPU time profiler blog post, it’ll come soon (hopefully on Monday).

Garden Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux derivate that aims to provide small, auditable Linux images for most cloud providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) and bare-metal machines. Garden Linux is the best Linux for Gardener nodes. Garden Linux provides great possibilities for customizing that is made by a highly customizable feature set to fit your needs.

gardenlinux.io

TL;DR: Yes, you can install it. And it works somewhat.

Installation

Let me tell you now how this all works. Of course, it uses proot-distro running in Termux (see previous article). Multiple distributions are available, but sadly, no Garden Linux. But we can easily add our own. We only need a proper tar.xz file. We can get bare-metal Gardener releases from GitHub Releases.

But there is a problem, the downloadable tar.xz files are a collection of files, xzipped together:

metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.manifest
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.manifest.log
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.raw
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.raw.log
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.release
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.release.log
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.tar
metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.tar.log

But we’re only interested in metal-gardener_prod-arm64-1877.0-ddd04088.tar. I extracted and xzed the file for you. You can find it at http://mostlynerdless.de/files/metal.1877.tar.xz.

Now we can create a distro file for Garden Linux in our Termux shell:

cd "$PREFIX/etc/proot-distro"
cat <<EOF > garden.sh
DISTRO_NAME="Garden Linux"
DISTRO_COMMENT="Stable release."

TARBALL_URL['aarch64']="http://mostlynerdless.de/files/metal.1877.tar.xz"
TARBALL_SHA256['aarch64']="b358d7f933709f52937a84784d745d33a98f470714ab082029c2602c16153b2f"
EOF

This allows us to install Garden Linux via:

proot-distro install garden

Now we can launch it via

proot-distro login garden

But we need to fix some locale issues before proceeding:

apt install -y locales
nano /etc/locale.gen # uncomment this line (remove the # at the beginning): en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Now you have a proper Garden Linux running locally on your phone.

Sadly, I didn’t find a way to install VSCode (double free error message) properly, so you can’t directly use it for CAP development. However, you can, of course, install and run SapMachine (the best JDK):

Try it out and have some fun with it. Feel free to tell me interesting use cases; I’ll happily feature them in a follow-up.

Conclusion

It’s fun to explore what modern smartphones are capable of. They become a more and more capable playground and eventually a working environment to work on the go.

See you in a few days for a profiling-related blog post.