I now have an 'official' Linux terminal in Android

3 July, 2025 - Categories: Linux - Tags: Android, terminal, Debian

By Steven Rosenberg

It's not like Android hasn't had its own Linux terminal until now. Termux has been around for a while. But now that Google is offering a standard Debian Linux terminal on many Android phones, is it more than a gimmick?

Since I have a Pixel phone, it should work. I followed the instructions in Jack Wallen's ZDNet article and soon had a Debian console without incident. I'm not sure if sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade is how you bring it up to date, but that's what I did.

I gave vi a try, and that's about it for now. I'm not sure if this terminal environment has its own filesystem separate from everything else in Android, or if you can access other parts of the system. Both scenarios have their advantages.

I could see myself using it to manage my servers. I did it with an Android app for a while with user name and password, but I never got my ssh keys into the phone and for that reason couldn't really do it. Maybe this will give me the incentive to get it working.

Even though the terminal font is super small, I might be persuaded that this is more than a gimmick if I could make use of my Bluetooth keyboard to do some work in Vim and other console programs. Maybe I could build and deploy a Zola blog from the phone.