I'm thinking about buying an android phone, yet I keep wondering how linux it really is? can I get a real shell without rooting it? do I get coreutils? is there a cli package manager? can install stuff to it from source?

what about rooting? what do I get or what do I loose if I root the phone.

Is it a linux, or is it a something a that uses linux?

Android
Root
FAQs

You can get a shell without rooting it, but you can't do much in that shell. I use connectbot, which gives an ssh connection. Works just fine.

No package managers for linux on the Android. The Android apps are, of course, packaged and that is handled by the android system.

You won't want to run too many things on the Linux system; the phone doesn't have that much capacity and is not optimized for that. There are Android apps that work through the desktop to do most things you'll want to do. I do use the console quite a bit, and I downloaded tcpdump so I could run it on mine periodically...just to check up on who it is talking to.

Rooting the phone gives you root, with all that implies. You lose nothing and gain a lot. Well...you generally lose the ability to accept over the air updates from your provider and since the only reason to root is to tailor the phone to suit yourself, you won't find that to be much of a loss.

Android is to Linux as X and a desktop manager is to Linux.

Q: How "linux" is the android?

A: Not very

If you're interested in programming for the Android, I strongly encourage you to download the SDK ... and be prepared to write a lot of Java.

If you want something like an Ubuntu desktop on handset ... Fuhgeddaboudidd

"Fuhgeddaboudidd" and "Android is to Linux as X and a desktop manager is to Linux."
that is my answer..

jiml8 thanks for the reply, and more thanks for the other post you explained your experiments will tcp dump experiments, it relieved my privacy concerns. About rooting, I don't trust all those warez rooters out there, is it possible to root it manually? without flashing the device with a image with an unknown origin.

You can root an Android manually, but the details are likely to vary somewhat with the phone. In pretty much all cases, you have to start with an exploit against the Linux kernel (google for "rageagainstthecage"). When the exploit succeeds (you may have to try several times...it is a timing exploit) you will gain temporary root for the duration of that boot. You then remount a couple of your partitions as read/write (they are mounted read-only by default) and you copy in a number of files necessary to provide and support root (including the su command and a busybox).

Once you have done these things correctly, you'll have root with your stock kernel.

As for "warez rooters", they aren't. The source code is freely available for all Android devices; they have obtained it legally and the mods they produce are legal. Just yesterday, I downloaded the latest 2.2 source for my phone from the manufacturer's website. I've been wanting to get into that system and hack a kernel, but I just don't have the time. I do have the source, though, so when I feel like killing a day I'll probably bring up the whole development environment. I personally have made some contributions to the phone I own, both directly and by advising some of the kernel devs for my phone about some features that would extend our capabilities a lot.

Pick your phone, then check out the community that uses that phone. You'll wind up gaining a fair amount of confidence in the kernels and mods...or you won't. On my phone, I'm certain I know more about kernel hacking than the devs who are working on it, but I don't have the time. The latest kernels, though, show that these guys (presently there are two of 'em) are learning a lot. Android 2.2 was released for my phone just a few days ago, and soon some rooted and modded kernels will be appearing.

Many of the mods really do improve the phone. My own phone was jerky and laggy as a stock phone, but since I've worked on it, it is smooth and far faster than stock.

Well, that wouldn't be a consideration for me; whether it works well, or not, would be, whether, or to what extent, it was free might be, but whether that well-working phone had one particular free OS rather than another (a BSD, say) wouldn't be a great concern.

Also remember that strictly Linux is a kernel, so you are asking 'How linux-like is its kernel?', and the answer to that can be 'very' and it still doesn't mean that you get any of the well-known command line utilities or a GUI that you would recognise.

I don't understand the distinction that you are making; it uses a customised Linux kernel and Google have done their bit by feeding changes back in to the kernel development process. So, I think that the answer is both, but that still might not meet your requirements because it has an interface to the user that is unfamiliar, by the standards of linux-on-desktop box. By the standards of embedded-linux-that-you-may-not-even-realise-is-running-an-OS, it is quite familiar, of course.

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Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.

so Android was built off an early linux kernel

I wonder if there is an android or linux kernel that I could run on an lg vm510 that is set up with brewmp

I think the chipset is qsc6075t

I am thinking I could put linux or android on the sdcard and develop a script or java app that would load that kernel from within brewmp as loadlin.exe does under DOS

I live in Mexico now and the phone was designed for virgin mobile and has no sim to swap out to enable use with another network