Running PostmarketOS on Android Termux proot without a custom ROM (2024)
7 comments
·July 23, 2025erelong
I guess I'm wondering what the advantage is with this over something like a proot-distro ubuntu distro running
or what specific use cases that ubuntu / android / termux wouldn't otherwise cover
(or really just use cases in general here)
yjftsjthsd-h
PMOS is designed to work on small screens, so for instance last I checked they were shipping a special Firefox configuration to make it fit on a phone screen reasonably well
saaspirant
Did anyone manage to install a Linux OS with proper desktop inside your Android phone?
I tried a lot of open source tools written for this with Termux but when I tried to use it via vnc, I got a black screen and there was a black plus or dot iirc.
heavyset_go
> I got a black screen and there was a black plus or dot iirc.
That happened because you started X but didn't start a display manager, window manager or desktop environment.
noosphr
https://github.com/termux/termux-x11
By default it launches with xfce.
The best tutorial for using it is: https://ivonblog.com/en-us/posts/termux-x11/ please ignore the pervy anime.
erelong
have you used this guide?
I actually tried to get PMOS support upstreamed: https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/issues/429 But unfortunately they didn't think it was different enough from Alpine and I didn't have the cycles to argue the point at the time. It would be really nice to get all of this packaged up to the point of being like 3 commands to go from just termux to a full PMOS on your Android phone, but it's a lot of different bits to get working together.