Running PostmarketOS on Android Termux proot without flashing a custom ROM

Summary

閱讀中文版Running postmarketOS and Phosh on Android phone without rooting or flashing a custom ROM.I’ve taken the unofficial and weird approach of running postmarketOS on Termux Proot, so that we can run mobile Linux on Android.A video demonstration. Phosh + postmarketOS runs on Sony Xperia 10 V Android 14.VIDEO1. Motivation#Why do I do this? To explore the possibilities of running mobile Linux on an Android phone. And we needed a desktop environment designed for touchscreens.It’s my personal wish to run mobile Linux on my Sony Xperia 5 & 10 series, but not many people have ported postmarketOS for them, and I didn’t succeed myself. So I’m just using Termux to taste the sweetness of the mobile Linux OS. I would like to share this highly experimental method of running postmarketOS on Android with you.postmarketOS is a GNU/Linux system designed for out-of-season mobile phones. Based on Alpine Linux, it has full Linux functionality and is able to run Linux pc applications, and it has become one of the most popular distro choice among PinePhone users. However, postmarketOS is not available for all Android phones, see postmarketOS pmbootstrap installation instruction. In order to port a postmarketOS to an Android phone, you need to pacth the Linux kernel a lot, and since many drivers are not compatible between Android and Linux, it is more difficult to create a postmarketOS ROM than to port LineageOS. Even if you finally get it up and running, there will be lots of missing proprietary drivers, which makes the system unpleasant to use.Moreover, the entry barrier for installing postmarketOS is very high, and for many mobile phone users, they can’t even unlock the bootloader, so it’s impossible to flash a custom ROM. This makes Termux a good option to consider, as it allows you to run Linux containers on your Android without rooting, and display the Linux container X server screen with Termux X11. The first question we have to ask is whether pmbootstrap can be run on Termux. Acco...