Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update

Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by david-given on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @04:29AM (#11157651)

GNURoot is amazing --- it's a non-root chroot which uses ptrace to fake being in a multiuser root environment while being in a single, normal user --- but it doesn't always work. Something about the security systems of modern Androids can cause it to fail in a variety of ways.

Weirdly, the exact failure mode seems to vary from device to device, so one person's tablet will work fine, while another's will report incorrect errnos on any system call which refers to a nonexistent file, while another will fail to load binaries, etc.

I used GNURoot heavily on a Nexus 7 for a while. Worked beautifully. I used it to write on, with a USB keyboard and a word processor what I wrote myself (<plug> http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder </plug>). But then I unwisely upgraded it to Android 5.1 and everything stopped working. These days I use a Chromebook with Crouton.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by alicewales on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @06:28AM (#11158099)

I registered just to say thank you for WordGrinder! I used it for a long time when I was in a sysadmin non-job where there was very little work to do.

I used to write blog posts in WordGrinder in a terminal over SSH (so it looked like work) then post them when I got home. It kept me sane until I'd saved up enough money to quit and find something a bit more rewarding.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by david-given on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @06:39AM (#11158158)

Thank you very much!

PS. If you're using a version older than 0.5, please upgrade. Now, I'm not saying that 0.4 was buggy, but... please upgrade. Quickly. Before it's too late.

In other news, 0.5 has unit tests now...

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by dheera on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @10:43AM (#11159621)

I used "Linux Deploy" for a while and my main gripe with the various Linux-for-Android solutions is I couldn't find a good GUI setup for them. The VNC-based solutions were laggy and didn't work when I tried to scroll or even right-click, and had wierd modes of mouse navigation. Using XServer XSDL worked better but still had random problems at times. Youtube had sound out of sync for instance. Also I really wish there was a GUI solution that could make use of the high-DPI screens of Android devices.

Crouton is working fine for me on a Chromebook though. Although sometimes I wonder if I should have gotten a Zenbook instead of a Chromebook ... the 16GB eMMC is really annoying.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by atomi on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @10:43AM (#11159619)

Have you checked out Termux? I still use my Nexus 7 more than any other device because of Termux. I can ssh into my irssi machine, run youtube-dl, and even do some light dev using golang and vim.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by gh02t on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @01:39PM (#11161157)

I love Termux, it works remarkably well and gives me real ssh. The app store ssh clients are OK, but I'd rather just use ssh on the command line. It doesn't do X11 AFAIK, but it works very smoothly with all the normal Unix utilities I use.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by voltagex_ on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @02:33PM (#11161615)

Is it any better than VX ConnectBot?

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by hexchain on Friday February 26, 2016 @06:59AM (#11180959)

Unlike ConnectBot, Termux is not a terminal, it's a customized linux environment (think of a chroot without really changing root directory), which provides its own linker and libraries (so it's not advised to run android system tools in Termux, thus not a terminal).

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by gh02t on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @06:18PM (#11163177)

I prefer it. ConnectBot is an SSH client, whereas Termux is something kind of like a chroot, though it's a bit different.

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by the8472 on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @07:23AM (#11158346)

why doesn't it just use user namespaces?

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @09:46AM (#11159140)

I don't think that Android uses those anywhere, so I would assume that most Android kernels are compiled without support for user namespaces. (The 1-2 year old Cyanogenmod kernel for Nexus 4 I had randomly lying around on this PC certainly doesn't have it enabled.)

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Re:Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update by david-given on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @09:50AM (#11159167)

I don't believe they're turned on in Android kernels.

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