Computer algebra system on a cell phone

Around early 2008, I became obsessed with the idea of not having a laptop: a phone could work fine. Years passed, and Linux-based phones never caught on. I gave up waiting and bought an Android phone. After a year of tinkering, I finally have a graphical computer algebra system running on it. It is an important step toward dodging my laptop entirely, although more work lies ahead.

Hardware

The phone is a Sony Xperia Arc S from 2011. It has a 1.4 GHz Scorpion Snapdragon CPU, which is a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 unit with ARMv7 instruction set. A quick comparison with hardinfo showed that it was about ten times slower than the single-core performance of the i7-620M processor in my laptop, which peaks at 3.33 GHz. The FPU is much slower than that.

A more limiting constraint is the RAM, which is only 512 MBytes. Bash reports even less than that, about 360 MBytes. Large-scale symbolic calculations will not happen on this hardware.

The screen is a 4.2-inch, true-colour TFT, with 854x480 pixels.

Software

The phone was rooted through official Sony channels, and it runs Cyanogenmod 10 (Android 4.1.2). Proprietary software was not installed.F-Droidreplaces Google Play as the software market. The kernel version is 2.6.32.

You will need aterminal, a VNC viewer, and Complete Linux Installer to proceed.

Get Linux Running

Complete Linux Installer needs you to store the image file in an appropriate folder in the root of the sdcard, e.g. archlinux for Arch, ubuntu, and so on. Arch Linux does not work well, the X server produces garbled screens. I recommend the small image of Ubuntu 13.04. It includes the LXDE desktop.

There is no actual installation taking place. The "installer" is a bash script that runs in a terminal and chroots into the image you downloaded. When you run the script for the first time, you will have to answer a few questions. Choose a passsword for your user. Then say yes to both ssh and VNC, and set resolution to 854x480. You can change these latter options in /root/cfg/ubuntu.img.cfg.

Configure Linux

Connect to the wireless network. The terminal should be logged in as root in your chrooted environment. Find out your IP address:

$ sudo ifconfig

Typing commands on your screen is excruciating, so log in to your phone from your computer;

$ ssh ubuntu@ip_address

Install screen to avoid problems with dropping wifi signals:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install screen
$ screen

Install Spyder and Sympy:

$ sudo apt-get install python-sympy spyder

This will take hundreds of megabytes to download and more to install. The image file will be nearly full, so delete all the cached files after the operation completes:

$ rm -fr /var/cache/apt/archives/*

You are ready to access the X client through VNC. The solution is inefficient. X could run in the framebuffer. Android and X cannot share the same framebuffer, so unless you are ready to work with Linux alone, you must use a virtual screen and access it through VNC.

The settings should be ubuntu for the password, localhost for the address, and 5900 for the port. Set colour format to 24-bit. The desktop should show if you press connect.

LXDE is not a touch-friendly interface. Pan in to click more precisely. Disable the screensaver.

Running the Computer Algebra System

Launch Spyder from the run menu. It will take a while. If the CPU load diagram does not show high-CPU load, then the launch failed due to memory problems. Restart the phone, and try again.

Start an Ipython interpreter in Spyder. The Ipython configuration file does not work correctly. To have pretty printing, you have to initialize Sympy's appropriate function:

from sympy import *
init_printing()

You are ready to test symbolic computations:

x, y = symbols('x y')
diff(sin(x*y)**x, x)

Future Work

Using VNC is an inefficient solution. Apart from the memory requirements of the client, rendering is slow. The X server should run in the framebuffer. Since this disables the Android graphics stack, phone functionality must be replaced by X-friendly solutions. Firefox OS or Sailfish OS might be a long-term solution. The former already works on an Arc S. The software side is nearing completion.

If you want a phone-powered laptop, the hardware side looks bleak. Linking up the phone with a Bluetooth keyboard is easy. Programming the phone's screen to function as a touchpad should not be difficult either -- some remote touchpad solutions work this way.

The component that is missing is a portable, battery-powered screen that takes HDMI input. Casetopadds a tiny 11-inch screen a keyboard to your phone. GeChic gives you a 15.6-inch portable screen, but the resolution is only 1366x768, and it weights a kilo.

You could salvage a full-HD LED panel from a laptop, or order a replacement screen. The panels use a low-level interface called LVDS. This is specific to each panel, and converting an HDMI input to this signal is not trivial. Chalkboard Electronics sells a programmable converter for $39, but it gives you little information on how to programme the interface for an arbitrary panel. Also, the board includes a power output for LCD screens, but it is superfluous for LED-lit panels.

If you select your components carefully, you should be able to construct a 17-inch laptop that weights about one kilogram, excluding the processing unit, the phone. Perhaps we will get there in the next year or two.