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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 do
by david-given 11y ago
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 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.
- alicewales 11y agoI 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.
- david-given 11y agoThank 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...
- the8472 11y agowhy doesn't it just use user namespaces?
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y agoI 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.)
- david-given 11y agoI don't believe they're turned on in Android kernels.
- atomi 11y agoHave 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.
- gh02t 11y agoI 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.
- voltagex_ 11y agoIs it any better than VX ConnectBot?
- gh02t 11y agoI prefer it. ConnectBot is an SSH client, whereas Termux is something kind of like a chroot, though it's a bit different.
- hexchain 11y agoUnlike 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).
- dheera 11y agoI 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.