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Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

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Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#131

Post by snazz »

swiley wrote: post #114
saagarjha wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that, but the competition isn't all that great so your comment isn't really adding much.

This is the whole "linux desktop isn't there yet" thing but with phones now. It's not shiny but it does work. Continuing to use abusive software is a disservice to yourself and everyone around you.

MMS doesn't work on any FOSS non-Android Linux phone I'm aware of, so they definitely do not work for a significant percentage of the population even for basic group text messages.

Building an alternative phone OS is much harder than building an alternative desktop OS—the requirements are much higher (battery life, cellular, app support) and the mobile web is far less developed as a stopgap compared to the desktop web.

Desktop Linux is usable for most developers and people who don't care about UI consistency or proprietary applications like Office and Creative Cloud. That's a reasonably significant chunk of the computer-using population. The same cannot be said of phones.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#132

Post by antocv »

LibertyBeta wrote: post #128
antocv wrote: post #127

Termux, Termux-api, there is a termux job scheduler thing. Also rsync and openssh on it. Then you copy the ssh public key from the phone to your "home-server", and setup a job scheduler to run rsync - now you have better than nextcloud syncing of your phones pictures/what-have-you with your home-server.

But what's the battery usage? And handling meshing? why not just use Syncthing?

Battery usage is basically zero, since I schedule it to run during evenings and night-time when it is charging with the termux-scheduler-thingie. Android wakes the script up, when those conditions are met, no battery waste. The script when waken up - it checks if the file left over from last time is older than 1h, if so continues to sync, otherwise exits.

Setup of a ssh connection is similar to https, rsync exchange of rsync is usually "all good" and thats it. Rsync otherwise is a very efficient but not very documented protocol network-bandwidth-usage-wise.

Mesh? Syncthing, tried it, sucked for reasons I cant remember now. Nextcloud - had it for years, mind you I was contributed to nextcloud the android app, fixing many bugs, but still it caused me data loss / picture loss. Which I only found out after implementing the rsync solution and seeing OMG rsync found so many pictures Nextcloud was supposed to keep in sync for the past year but it just bugged over.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#133

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

rektide wrote: post #37
j-james wrote: post #27

Termux has recently run into issues with Android 10 and the more recent APIs, which break its form of package management. Their workaround is fairly clever (although not yet implemented) but means that updates to the Play Store version have been temporarily put on hold. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

Comments like this one[1] that mention having difficulty using Termux to access SD cards keep making me feel like we are radically over-securing devices. More and more it feels like the OS, the browser, are guarding the user not against bad apps, but also against the user. Firefox Mobile only allowing less than a dozen extensions. Chrome mobile supporting no extensions. These are different than the OS, but the same k…

Can the user really achieve "security" without having full control. When the user is not the customer of the third party providing "security". (In this case advertisers are the customer.)

Hopefully courts will begin to recognise that this sort of "security" is in fact created for the benefit of the company and its customers, not users. Any benefits to users are incidental.

Users are not soliciting these "security" measures. They are always initiated by the company.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#134

Post by MarkusWandel »

rektide wrote: post #37
j-james wrote: post #27

Termux has recently run into issues with Android 10 and the more recent APIs, which break its form of package management. Their workaround is fairly clever (although not yet implemented) but means that updates to the Play Store version have been temporarily put on hold. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

Comments like this one[1] that mention having difficulty using Termux to access SD cards keep making me feel like we are radically over-securing devices. More and more it feels like the OS, the browser, are guarding the user not against bad apps, but also against the user. Firefox Mobile only allowing less than a dozen extensions. Chrome mobile supporting no extensions. These are different than the OS, but the same k…

Well, I approach it from two angles at once. One, a pocket computer running Linux which, using Termux, could be a full Linux machine - in which I can run Perl scripts on my SMS messages, grep my emails, rename and organize my photo library and so on. Which was presumably mostly possible on old, less secure versions of Android. With Android 10 and its exec restriction, sure you can still install precompiled packages as apk's but what about simply compiling a small C program and running it? So the old school tinkerer is sad that I'm locked out of a perfectly good Linux machine that I own.

However the other angle is, this phone is an appliance and I want it to just work. I'm personally competent enough to have that cake (programmability) and eat it too (reliable usability) - after all I've been running Red Hat/Fedora as my primary desktop OS at home for two decades and it works just fine, thank you. But I also remember what a horrible mess the average schmoe's home computer was back in the good old days... remember an outdated version of Internet Explorer with half the screen obscured by a stack of junky toolbars, and the whole thing running at 800x600 on a monitor capable of higher resolutions "because otherwise the letters are too small". Good riddance.

Anyway for the moment, second-hand desktop and laptop machines that can run a full, unencumbered compute environment are still plentiful. Maybe by the time they aren't, I'll be a truly old fart who doesn't care any more.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#135

Post by jhbadger »

vorpalhex wrote: post #106
MarkusWandel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syncing photos off. Termux has sshd (you have to start it manually once, then it stays running until Termux is killed or the phone is rebooted). With ssh-copy-id it takes a single command (1-line script) to rsync the phone's DCIM directory to my main machine for further processing. Nothing needs to be done on the phone at all other than to lightly nudge it to wake it up so sshd sees the connection attempt. Downside:…

Rooting isn't as terrifying as it used to be, and it means you can do actual real backups and genuinely own your data.

One issue is that these days many people work at places that have BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. This means you install work related apps on your own phone rather than being supplied with a work phone like in the old days. Many of these apps refuse to work on a rooted phone "for security" (justified or not, that's the argument)

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#136

Post by MarkusWandel »

antocv wrote: post #129
noja wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatives: Resilio Sync: use it in backup mode to sync photos to your desktop pc/mac/nas. Delete photos from phone when you want to free space. Also lets you access and edit normal files, either on demand or by sync. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.resilio.sy... PhotoSync: sync your photos to pretty much anything. https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html

The thing with these apps is, not your suggestion in particular, is its not ever as it was 20 years ago "use this app it does this", now it is, "use this app it will maybe ask to ship your data to NSA or China, ask for account registering signup, for sure it will make some network calls to who knows where and include adtracking and other nastiness, and will nag about some license or buy-up". Termux, ssh and rsync. Th…

The other thing is that these apps invariably screw usability up in some way. I use Sweech as a Wifi file server on the phone, but to get pictures off... whoops, no multi select. so if I want to grab the newest 50 photos off the wife's phone, that's 50 checkmarks to click (I'm not geeky enough to have Termux on the wife's phone). Or apps that only talk to a companion app on your (Windows or Mac) computer using a proprietary protocol. Or simply need a crapload of taps to get the job done.

Whereas the rsync method is exactly this: "syncphone" on my main machine. If it doesn't connect, nudge the phone so it wakes up (it'll connect anyway eventually; the phone seems to wake up on its own now and then). And then it's all automatic and scriptable from that point. I realize that perhaps 0.1% of smartphone users have the skills to automate things at that level and therefore care.

The auto rsync when charging is a good idea. I guess Termux can still get access to the battery/charge state?

Another example of user hostility: While on Android phones, at least older ones, bulk transfer of files via USB to/from a Linux machine has always been hit and miss, it's been rock solid on iDevices. Just do "idevicepair" and after that, transfer away to your heart's content, fast and solid. Only now I read that the latest version of IOS may have messed that up too, in the name of security of course.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#137

Post by Wildgoose »

opan wrote: post #123
cstross wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to note that Termux is totally amazeballs on a Cosmo Communicator: https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator Having a proper fold-out QWERTY hardware keyboard makes for an eccentric Android experience, but Termux (or, alternatively, their dual-boot Linux solution) makes a huge difference.

Shame about the keyboard problems, though. They rushed it out before fixing them when the Gemini had them. A common issue is that alt-tab activates caps lock because alt is adjacent to fn, and fn-tab is caps lock. I'm not an engineer, but I assume it's poorly designed. I have the Gemini PDA and will never give that company my money again.

I have the Gemini PDA and love it. (I don't use it as my 'phone though, even though it has cellular). I've ordered the AstroSlide and will be using that as my 'phone when it arrives.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#138

Post by jonny383 »

Termux has saved one of our projects literally tens of thousands of dollars in SMS fees from someone like Twilio.

We have a few areas where non urgent SMS reminders need to be sent to users. We literally just use a couple of cheap ($100) Android phones with termux on an unlimited message plan with a local provider (who approved us for commercial usage).

The actual process is a glorified bash script that pulls API jobs down with curl and then uses termux-sms to actually send the message.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#139

Post by rektide »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #134
rektide wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this one[1] that mention having difficulty using Termux to access SD cards keep making me feel like we are radically over-securing devices. More and more it feels like the OS, the browser, are guarding the user not against bad apps, but also against the user. Firefox Mobile only allowing less than a dozen extensions. Chrome mobile supporting no extensions. These are different than the OS, but the same k…

Well, I approach it from two angles at once. One, a pocket computer running Linux which, using Termux, could be a full Linux machine - in which I can run Perl scripts on my SMS messages, grep my emails, rename and organize my photo library and so on. Which was presumably mostly possible on old, less secure versions of Android. With Android 10 and its exec restriction, sure you can still install precompiled packages a…

I agree that there are multiple angles. I think of them as different contexts. What I see is that, at the moment, we're designing, permitting, allowing, creating, constructing, & securing only for one angle, only for the pure-consumerism mode, the mode where we assume the user is in "don't care/don't know" mode.

This mode, however, is such a denigration to humanity. All the spirit of augmenting the human intellect, computing being servant to the human psyche, harnessed by human creativity... it's a way-more-than-tacit admission of defeat, a brazen retreat. It just seems... unaccounted for. We don't talk about this loss, this turning around. We trumpet security & chalk up wins for helping each other, but there's no mainstream dialogue that supports the deeply enriched angle, the immersive, expert computer user, the post-training-wheels life. Everything is centered around the dumb consumer, all of computing focused around a consumerized applicationized "just work" mentality.

I think we've been drinking poison.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app with no rooting

#140

Post by badsectoracula »

bosswipe wrote: post #39
j-james wrote: post #27

Termux has recently run into issues with Android 10 and the more recent APIs, which break its form of package management. Their workaround is fairly clever (although not yet implemented) but means that updates to the Play Store version have been temporarily put on hold. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

I hate the direction Google is taking Android. They're on an appliance-ification quest trying to hide any exposed linux-ness of the OS, including trying to remove developer access to all file handles. They always claim it's in the name of security but my suspicion is that it's an effort to transition from Linux to Fuchsia.

> They always claim it's in the name of security

Like pretty much everything that goes against the user and people are way too quick to accept anything that has the word "security" applied to it.

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