Xournal on Android via GNU Linux chroot

I've been trying to get xournal running on my Android tablet.

Rational: Thinkpad X230T something like £1200 when I bought a year ago. Samsung Note 8: £200 seven months ago. Both come with Wacom pen... I'd like to migrate to regular Thinkpad laptop and tablet for xournal.

Ideally: run Gnome 3 and Fedora natively and have a real OS. I find Android frustrating to work on.

Android apps: Quill pretty good for notes (and free software) but can't annotate PDFs. Stuff that came from samsung: proprietary crap, although seems to have a following.

Linux in chroot

I use LinuxDeploy. There are others. I installed Fedora 20 arm with XFCE desktop. Can't get Gnome 3 running (yet?!).

Native X using Framebuffer

• I tried running X using fbdev writing to Android's framebuffer. This works well but touchscreen Linux driver has bugs that mean it doesn't work with X. Pen support was fantastic however, just like native IIRC. I documented it a bit on meefik's LinuxDeploy page [https://github.com/meefik/linuxdeploy/wiki/Framebuffer-notes].

• Issue with touchscreen drivers is [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64029] (which fixes the crash but they don't work). I also filed [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80470]. The issue is Android drivers which don't follow the Linux Kernel spec.

• No video acceleration.

• You have access to only whatever GNU/Linux you have in the chroot (so you can't use the Android keyboards etc. I use eekboard.

• I think this would be my preferred approach if I can fix the touchscreen issue.

X servers on Android

As of 2014-06 there are two X servers as Android apps, "X Server" and "XServer XSDL". The former crashes. I use the latter. There are portrait and landscape versions. You can use the whatever Android keyboard you like. I use "Hacker's Keyboard".

Here's a screenshot of the sort of environment I use in portrait mode. (The xournal here is my "gnome3" branch from https://github.com/cbm755/xournal, although XFCE doesn't do GtkHeaderBar right).

2014-06-02: I cannot get good pen input yet: [https://github.com/pelya/xserver-xsdl/issues/14], except by using Pelya's "Gimp/Inkscape App", see below.

Xournal on Gimp/Inkscape App

This is some version of Debian in a chroot. Versions of Xournal available:

• Older xournal in packages (0.4.5?). Poor pen input. Great (good?) pen input in Gimp so presumably Xournal's fault... Here's a screenshot in which I've written "Xournal 0.4.5".

• gtk3 branch of dmgerman/xournal: very poor pen input. In right on screenshot, I've written "Xournal gtk3".

• next branch of dmgerman/xournal: quite good! screenshot above on left where I wrote "Xournal next".

But at least with current code, xournal can't tell pen from finger touch so no "touch as hand tool" yet ([https://github.com/pelya/xserver-xsdl/issues/14])

Other options

• VNC instead of X server app: I think this gave poor results with Pen. Old screenshot: