GNU utilities on Android, without rooting the device (obsolete)

Post date: Oct 23, 2012 10:03:52 AM

Note: GNURoot obsoleted the information below.

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Ubuntu noroot is a preliminary package that will provide a full Debian environment with package management.

The system is not very usable as-it-is. For one, it runs in VNC and X11. It can however be coerced into a proper text-only system. Here's how to do it (approximately).

• Install the package
• Install the Android Terminal Emulator
• Now we need to break out of the chroot environment and chmod a+rwx everything, so
  • From the X11 screen, run /bin/bash in terminal to get a shell
  • export FAKEROOT_EXCLUDE_PATH=/data:$FAKEROOT_EXCLUDE_PATH
  • chmod -R a+rwx /data/data/cuntubuntu.com/*

When you want to use the textmode environment,

• Start the android terminal emulator
• cd /data/data/com.cuntubuntu/files
• ./chroot.sh bin/sh fakeroot.sh bin/sh
• bash

This works because the "terminal emulator" user now has rwx access of the debian system. Note that apt-get only works on some packages. In the meanwhile, use this workaround

• dpkg-deb -x <packagename.deb> /