Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

termux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 148 posts

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#121

Post by hsivonen »

jstimpfle wrote: post #94
jeromenerf wrote: post #90

Termux is a great project, may it be for cli lovers, hackers, road warriors ... However, I have little trust in mobile devices nowadays and I don't feel safe copying private ssh/gpg/vpn/credentials data on them anymore. Planned obsolescence, theft risk, vendor/hardware/firmware issues, general feel of lack of control, ... As a consequence, I tend to use my smartphone as anonymously as possible, mostly as a camera, an…

Make a separate ssh key for your phone with restricted sftp-only access to a phone-specific backup directory on your server.

What's a good tutorial for restricting sftp access to a particular directory? (Assuming the same host supports ssh login, too.)

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#122

Post by jstimpfle »

hsivonen wrote: post #121
jstimpfle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a separate ssh key for your phone with restricted sftp-only access to a phone-specific backup directory on your server.

What's a good tutorial for restricting sftp access to a particular directory? (Assuming the same host supports ssh login, too.)

Assuming openssh-server, look for "internal-sftp" in sshd_config(5). And of course, also google a bit around that.

It's worth pointing out that this will preclude use of rsync and similar tools that require running a server on the remote machine. I'm not aware of robust alternatives so if anyone else knows one please tell me! (and I consider rsync-restricted shells and similar approaches a hack)

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#123

Post by wiredfool »

Asooka wrote: post #96
iamcwu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromebook I'm still waiting for Amazon to restock after I saw this post go up: https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-devel...

On my chromebook I use crouton[1], which is arguably more "native". You get an Ubuntu install in a chroot and can even run X11 apps in a chrome window. I was even able to compile neovim, you just need to set it up to use the system's lua and luarocks. [1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Termux works on stock chromebooks _without_ switching to developer mode.

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#124

Post by realusername »

laggyluke wrote: post #95
jeromenerf wrote: post #90

Termux is a great project, may it be for cli lovers, hackers, road warriors ... However, I have little trust in mobile devices nowadays and I don't feel safe copying private ssh/gpg/vpn/credentials data on them anymore. Planned obsolescence, theft risk, vendor/hardware/firmware issues, general feel of lack of control, ... As a consequence, I tend to use my smartphone as anonymously as possible, mostly as a camera, an…

I have a complete opposite feelings: mobile apps are actually sandboxed, modern phones have secure elements in hardware and the attack surface itself is pretty limited. On the other hand, there's virtually no sandboxing on your laptop. As software developers, we pull random code from the internet all the time and it's generally trivial to steal every secret that your user has access to ( https://xkcd.com/1200/ ) Pers…

The apps are indeed sandboxed but who knows what everything below is doing. I trust more the maintainer of my distribution than whoever hacked an android rom to commercialize it.

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#125

Post by mordnis »

If you plan on trying Termux, you should also look into Hacker's Keybaord: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboar...

In landscape mode, it provides all the keys found on a regular keyboard which make life in a terminal easier (tab, ctrl, arrows, etc.).

EDIT: In Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#126

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

wiredfool wrote: post #123
Asooka wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my chromebook I use crouton[1], which is arguably more "native". You get an Ubuntu install in a chroot and can even run X11 apps in a chrome window. I was even able to compile neovim, you just need to set it up to use the system's lua and luarocks. [1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Termux works on stock chromebooks _without_ switching to developer mode.

This is very important for schools which may lend students Chromebooks and thus likely restrict dev mode.

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#127

Post by drux »

haberman wrote: post #17

Wow. Given that this works with ChromeOS, this appears to give me what I've been looking for for a long time: something that makes a Chromebook a usable developer laptop. Now time to buy a Chromebook and try it out.

https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-devel...

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#128

Post by shams93 »

jeromenerf wrote: post #90

Termux is a great project, may it be for cli lovers, hackers, road warriors ... However, I have little trust in mobile devices nowadays and I don't feel safe copying private ssh/gpg/vpn/credentials data on them anymore. Planned obsolescence, theft risk, vendor/hardware/firmware issues, general feel of lack of control, ... As a consequence, I tend to use my smartphone as anonymously as possible, mostly as a camera, an…

Well rather than using it on a phone, look at the scenario of using this on a chromebook with android app support. Currently to run crouton to do linux development on a chromebook you have to run in the entire insecure developer mode where you're wide open to attack. Using termux on a chromebook under normal mode you can work without having to compromise your chromeos device's default security setup.

Re: Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app

#129

Post by willyjoe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #65
frostwhale wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly would you use it for? Not trying to be negative, I'm just not sure what would be worth typing out on a phone keyboard on the go, instead of waiting until I have access to an actual keyboard. I guess if you have a keyboard for your phone that's also different. (so for android tablets etc this is great)

Termux + full keyboard is a game-changer. That's how I run my 9" tablet, and whilst not quite the laptop-replacement I'd like it to be, it's closer than anything else I've seen. The fact that I don't have the critical weak point of the laptop hinge to deal with, and the portrait/landscape flexibility of a tablet (I read a lot of formatted docs) is tremendously useful. TL;DR: Your Android device really is a fully-capa…

what keyboard do you recommend?
Post reply on HN