[BRLTTY] Android and SSH/Terminal

[Dave Mielke]

Thanks, Jason. I was unaware of this but have now checked it out. It's very cool.

Yes, it's a Debian-based virtual machine. Google introduced it in Android 15 and has been improving it ever since. They clearly label it as experimental so keep this in mind.

You won't see it till you enable it. Go into Settings -> System -> Developer Options, find the switch labeled Linux Development Environment, and turn it on. After you do this, you'll find an app named Terminal in the All Apps drawer which, as usual, you can move to your home screen or wherever else.

First, an important note. If you turn that switch off then it'll remove all of your changes so only do that if you really want to.

The first time you launch Terminal, it'll ask you if you want to download the 600MB worth of data that it needs. I didn't time it but it took somewhere around maybe 20 seconds. There's a progress bar as well as a box that tells you how many megabytes have been downloaded so far.

You'll be asked to grant two permissions. The first is if Terminal can recod audio, and the second is if it can look for nearby devices (which basically means if it can use Bluetooth).

You're initially logged into a fully accessible text console as the user droid, UID 1000, which has sudo privileges. If you double-tap that window then your regular on-screen keyboard appears and you can type input. It all works just fine.

While I can't personally test it, being as I can't see the screen, it claims to offer full graphical support, with acceleration via a wayland server.

It even offers port forwarding so you can do things like start an sshd server inside it and make it possible to ssh into it from outside, i.e. from your desktop/laptop over your Wi-Fi network. Note that, if you do this, you'll be seeing the Linux file system inside the virtual machine - not Android's host file system.

another for example is that you can run a web server inside the Linux system and then use port forwarding to access it from Android's host Chrome browser to localhost:port.

A note on port forwarding. You can only forward non-privileged ports, i.e. 1024 or above, since Android is very protective of the privileged ports (less than 1024).

This should be enough to pique your curiosity. Have fun!

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