Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that'll let you run Linux apps. It'll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that’ll let you run Linux apps. It’ll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

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Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

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Google is still working on improving the Terminal app as well as AVF before shipping this feature. AVF already supports graphics and some input options, but it’s preparing to add support for backing up and restoring snapshots, nested virtualization, and devices with an x86_64 architecture. It’s also preparing to add some settings pages to the Terminal app, which is pretty barebones right now apart from a menu to copy the IP address and stop the existing VM instance. The settings pages will let you resize the disk, configure port forwarding, and potentially recover partitions.

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If you’re wondering why you’d want to run Linux apps on Android, then this feature is probably not for you. Google added Linux support to Chrome OS so developers with Chromebooks can run Linux apps that are useful for development. For example, Linux support on Chrome OS allows developers to run the Linux version of Android Studio, the recommended IDE for Android app development, on Chromebooks. It also lets them run Linux command line tools safely and securely in a container.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
    162·
    2 months ago

    I’ll just run Linux removed on…Linux

    Android is a variant of Linux, just not GNU/Linux because of not using glibc.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        With diffs sometimes around 5m lines of code (in case of qcom)

        Nobody’s denying that. Many embedded distributions targeted special hardware are like that.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        71·
        2 months ago

        android just uses the kernel

        Yes and the kernel’s name is “Linux”. No other software is named “Linux”. Ask Linus Torvalds if you don’t believe me.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 months ago

            there’s more to an operating system that a program needs other than the kernel(?)

            Yes, and the other parts have other names, like the toolkit GTK or the C standard library glibc and all those things make up a Linux distribution, like Fedora.