proot-distro

Just yesterday I needed this and resorted to running the harness in a sprite[0] in a proot distro[1] in termux: while I appreciated the symbolism of recurrence, it was a pain to set up. Will have a look. [0]: https://sprites.dev/ [1]: https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

Termux alone seems really quirky to me. Andronix fakes "having root" as I understand and I was able to get more of the services I wanted running on it. https://github.com/termux/proot-distro looks really interesting too and I intend to test it in the future!

I actually tried to get PMOS support upstreamed: https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/issues/429 But unfortunately they didn't think it was different enough from Alpine and I didn't have the cycles to argue the point at the time. It would be really nice to get all of this packaged up to the point of being like 3 commands to go from just termux to a full PMOS on your Android phone, but it's a lot of different bits to get working together.

Linux user namespaces can be used to create containers without having root access, see ex. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66084/simulate-chro... There's also https://github.com/termux/proot-distro which may or may not count as containers depending on how you define the word but I think it does count

Termux has now a nice wrapper (manager?) for proot [1]. I once wanted to submit a wrapper but got an angry response as the first comment to my PR and it was closed. Guess enough people did that until they decided maybe it's not a bad idea after all. [1]: https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

Not the OP, but if they mentioned they did it from Termux you can install an X server and a full desktop browser like Firefox either directly or via a chroot/proot "container" via for example proot-distro [0]. [0] https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

Okay, got curious and played with it... it seems like just this will do it? /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/etc/proot-distro/alpine-pmos.sh DISTRO_NAME="Alpine Linux with postmarketos added" DISTRO_COMMENT="Rolling release branch (edge)." TARBALL_URL['aarch64']="https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/releases/aarch64/alpine-minirootfs-3.2…" TARBALL_SHA256['aarch64']="6ae4d30a75dacd5991a1c1ab13453a119b54a437d236b1680b6d844f015d141b" # based on https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/blob/master/distro-build/alpine.sh distro_setup() { mv ./etc/apk/repositories ./etc/apk/repositories.initial echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main" > ./etc/apk/repositories echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community" >> ./etc/apk/repositories echo

Oh, cool; that would be really nice for lowering friction, and honestly it might be a nice thing to have in termux outright (even if you're still using Android on a long-term basis). I wonder how hard it would be to get postmarketos added as an official option through https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/tree/master - seems like it should be straightforward? There's already an Alpine config, and PMOS is pretty close to that

There's proot-distro, which does the same thing but with conventional linux distributions like Debian and Arch. https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

I think we fundamentally value different things from our mobile devices. Waydroid is a low level compatiblity layer, but that's still not native and not guaranteed compatibility. I want all social media apps to work, I don't want to ask others to change apps. If you want full freedom from google, GrapheneOS feels like the best de-googled solution. In some ways, PRoot is to android what waydroid is to linux, except PRoot is way more capable. Google free AOSP, like GrapheneOS exists so it's not fair to say it's the same problem. I appreciate having access to things like Kali NetHunter and value that over being able to install and run a mainline kernel on bare hardware. I don't see a difference in installing a completely different OS vs PRoot, because I am focused on the functionality. I wouldn't be able to tell you a meaningful difference i

Folks who want a more traditional linux environment and libraries then what termux comes with might find proot-distro[1] to meet their needs. Basically it allows running an actual arm linux distro in a pseudo container created by (ab)using the ptrace syscall to emulate root privileges. This has a fairly big performance impact, but it works if you want to run arbitrary arm linux binaries. [1] https://github.com/termux/proot-distro