I have a very old Samsung galaxy tablet running android 4.4 no way of upgrading due to age but it’s a shame to just throw it away. Only browser that runs is opera mini but no way it will access mail clients either through a web site such as orange or Gmail or outlook, tried to install a mail system and just hangs. Secure sites fail… It’s a dead dog.
But then whilst browsing came across Debian noroot as a download from the android store.
It looks ok from images shown and as I have nothing to loose on the tablet, just wonder if anyone else has tried it and your experience. I don’t really want to root the tablet if I can help it as I do have one site for our association running on it as a terminal showing events in the village
Comments please
There is also Termux and Andronix. Neither require root.
I use Termux at moment.
I used to use Gnuroot Debian… I believe it is no longer available.
They are all CLI only, no graphics
3 Likes
I use Termux all the time… Thought I was stuck when Google’s API fascism handicapped / hamstrung the app store version of TermUX so that it was barely functional - but then I got the F-Droid store to work on my Android 10 device (Galaxy S9+) and it’s great…
I don’t know if F-Droid would work on Android 4.x though… I wouldn’t bother with the Google Play Store version of TermUX.
The thing I use it mostly for is running sshd (which is launched by typing “sshd”) - so I can ssh to my phone, and I can even do stuff like rsync to pull my photos (I’ve previously shared the script I use for this). I don’t have write access to most of the phone’s folders - just a subset of TermUX defined folders on my SD-Card.
3 Likes
If command line only then not much use as a replacement as I was hoping to get a browser and mail
Thanks guys
There are CLI browsers and mailers… everything is reduced to text.
I used text based mailers for years.
1 Like
Me too. You can get at lot of use out of it, like checking the weather and much more.
Right. I make abundant use of w3m and lynx even on my main system (Linux Lite).
These are quite good browsers, actually.
Cheers from Rosika 
3 Likes