Running the Linux desktop on Android
In this article we’re going to install a fully-featured Linux environment, complete with graphical desktop, onto your Android device.
One of the key technologies many of these systems employ is pRoot (https://proot-me.github.io). This is an implementation of the chroot utility that’s popular in the desktop/server Linux world. But chroot requires root privileges, which aren’t available by default on Android. So pRoot provides most of the benefits of chroot by doing some clever directory binding.
CHECK THE BELOW
Unlike Termux, however, not all of these Linux-on-Android systems use BusyBox (https://busybox.net). The reason is because the whole purpose of these systems is to provide a ‘full’ installation, whereas BusyBox is designed to wrap up a number of common utilities into a single binary. Instead, these systems install a typical Linux bootstrap containing the full-strength versions of programs like ls, cp and mkdir.
There is one bit of additional technology for these systems that wasn’t required for Termux, however. We’ll be installing a full-strength Linux distro, which brings with it the expectation of a GUI desktop. We will get one of these, but in order to do so we’ll need to make an important decision regarding the graphics system.
LINUX-ON-ANDROID
As we’ve said a few times, the packages we’ll be looking at, as well as some others, run in userspace. This means they only have the permissions of the current user, which in the case of Android is always a normal user –that is, not
