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

termux.com

41–50 of 148 posts

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

#42
Hey, I ported apt to Android 4.4 a while back and was hoping to eventually get to design it in a way that it would be a suitable backend for a third party app store that could also safely install core components and patches to phones that allowed it. My main goal was to eventually get Android split up into a collection of packages much like a modern Linux distribution in order to improve security and upgradeability. I'm glad to see termux is taking the first steps towards this :)

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

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question but why not just run Debian on a chrome book, or any cheap laptop? Or spend a bit more for a thinkpad or dell XPS

Because I don't want to be a sysadmin. I want to take advantage of all the work Google has done to make ChromeOS a slick user experience, including good drivers, seamless and invisible auto-update, fast boot, integration with Google services, etc.

Don’t know why you are being downvoted- this is the exact reason I bought a Mac, can totally sympathize. I hear the dell and thinkpad have this problem solved from the driver point of view at least though.

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

#44
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, just a standard Pixel.

Did you try the Termux-chroot package mentioned in https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Differences_from_Linux to see if /dev might work ?

I still get "Permission denied" when I try to "ls /dev".

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

#46

This is amazing. I've been dreaming of something like this forever for the iPhone. iOS restrictions are probably never going to be lifted, however. I get by with Panic's Coda terminal, which is great, but even though I have multiple remote servers, sometimes I'd like to run something on my local network, like ping, wireshark, etc Running mutt as a local mail client would be nice as well

There's someone working towards this as part of the Blink app for iOS: https://github.com/blinksh/blink/pull/281

I could see this getting onto the app store eventually.

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

#47
post #8

I installed this months ago and cant figure out how to access localhost through my browser. I wrote a sample flask app and ran it but cant access it outside of termux. Is there a way to do so?

  python3 -m http.server
  http://localhost:8000/  # on phone
However, I haven't been able to access a server running on termux on my phone from anywhere else. I suspect servers are blocked by my mobile ISP (makes sense!), but I never got to the bottom of it.

Should work over wifi though.

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

#48
post #21

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)

I use it as a replacement for Android apps in several cases. - Need to jot a note: vim is far better than most native apps - Need to access a remote system: use ssh or mosh - Need a calculator: Python is there, with a lot of useful libraries It even emulates a mouse, so elinks is quite usable on text heavy websites. For some mobile hostile websites it is more usable since the text is large enough to be legible. A sim…

Do you do vim with Gboard/SwiftKey or do you have a hardware keyboard?

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

#49
post #6

I tried this out a little while ago and I was really impressed. It's worth mentioning that this isn't just a Debian chroot/container, the software is actually compiled to run natively on the Android NDK. It seems like they work around any limitations of Bionic compared to glibc by patching NDK headers and using support libraries. Check out their "ports tree" to see what packages are available: https://github.com/term…

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)

I used it for SSH and scripts like youtube-dl. Also for the short time that I played Pokemon Go, I deployed a flask server (to track pokemon overlayed on gmaps) in termux and accessed it from Android's browser. It was sweet.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question but why not just run Debian on a chrome book, or any cheap laptop? Or spend a bit more for a thinkpad or dell XPS

Because I don't want to be a sysadmin. I want to take advantage of all the work Google has done to make ChromeOS a slick user experience, including good drivers, seamless and invisible auto-update, fast boot, integration with Google services, etc.

It's false that you have to be a sysadmin to run Linux, and the users here know it perfectly well. There hasn't been a laptop (or desktop for that matter) I owned in the past ~8 years that hasn't worked flawlessly out of the box on the latest Ubuntu/Linux Mint (granted, with the exception of dedicated GPU drivers). And I got everything you mentioned: slick UX, good drivers, auto updates, fast boot on SSD. Granted, no integration with Google services, and I consider that a feature. I also have this little extra:

Owning my computer, as opposed to paying for it to be controlled by Our Benevolent Overlords.

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