An embedded software engineer at the European Space Agency shares the story of the quest to “dominate” his new tablet:
Just like it’s predecessor, I wanted to run a Debian chroot inside it — that would allow me to apt-get install and run things like Privoxy, SSH SOCKS/VPN tunnels, Flask mini-servers, etc; and in general allow me to stay in control. But there was no open-source way to do this… and I could never trust “one-click roots” that communicate with servers in China… It took me weeks to reverse engineer my tablet — and finally succeed in becoming root. The journey was quite interesting, and included both hardware and software tinkering. I learned a lot while doing it — and wanted to share the experience with my fellow Slashdotters…
He writes that “I trust Debian. Far more than I trust the Android ecosystem,” and describes everything from how he probed the boot process and created his own boot image to hunting for a way “to tell SELinux to get off my lawn”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How I Freed My Android Tablet: A Journey in Reverse Engineering