How linux is Android?

duckwars

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Apr 2, 2010
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So, I've been playing with Ubuntu for a good year now, nothing big, just home server and things like that. Put ubuntu on my netbook, I like it, it's good stuff.

Question is, how many of the standard linux programs run on Android. Can I ssh into it? Can I mount it using sshfs? Basically, I'm curious how many of the server programs I can put on it, and wether or not I can mount my home server on my (soon to have) Android phone just as another drive.

I'm assuming all these things would require me to "root" the device. Not much of a question, but I've been curious about this for a while now.
 

__Ryan__

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May 24, 2010
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Android uses the Linux kernel but the system libraries are custom and don't support the same interface that these programs you speak of. To get them to run you could need to root your device and install a custom ROM that includes these libraries and then install the programs compiled for the ARM architecture. This would probably give you something like the N900 which runs a full Debian distribution.

Another route, the CyanogenMod ROM for the Droid includes BusyBox, ssh, and Bash for example. In this case these programs were recompiled and linked against the standard Android libraries.