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Comment by imhoguy | Hacker News Reader

We could have pretty decent $8 Linux machines, with USB, screen, touch, audio, MBs or even GBs RAM, if there would be some standard way to sideload fresh GNU/Linux onto billions of retired Android devices.

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The Termux app provides a pretty good fraction of the useful Linux stuff. It's basically a userspace chroot environment. You can run a lot of Linux distributions this way, though some of the features don't work. Can even have a desktop environment and run things like desktop Chromium. Or things like FTP servers, etc etc.

Basically you get most of the useful functionality from installing Linux, without needing root.

Is it really chroot? As far as I can tell termux is just a terminal emulator +shell, and if given proper permissions it can very well access regular root without doing anything special.

It's called PRoot, you can install other Linux distributions (e.g. Arch, Debian, etc.) within the virtual root environment.

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot

I use Termux as my daily driver, but I never thought it can run desktop stuff. Still HW (Samsung) is locked down a bit as it doesn't allow autostart after power failure or can't power up without battery.

I have manjaro installed on my note 9 under termux, with vnc viewer to loopback to display x-windows stuff. With the Dex functionality I can plug in a mouse, keyboard and monitor to use it as a Linux desktop.

It runs blender and gcc pretty well!

Thats basically the goal of the postmarketOS project: https://postmarketos.org/

I thought you could root them and install Linux?

But yeah, we need to recycle these phones by making them home servers, etc.

Yep, LineageOS+Termux is serving me very well, still it is a lot of manual steps and hacking varying by HW vendor and model.

Depends on the phone. It's been getting more difficult.

linux made by corporations exactly to prevent it.

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