Lubuntu Android

Hi Team,

i want install lubuntu on my lcd android, any referens or any documentations for it?

regards,
adrian

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Lubuntu provides ISOs only for amd64 architecture (see https://lubuntu.me/downloads/ for what we offer) and you didn’t provide any clues as to what architecture you’re asking about, but android is usually ARM based (armhf, arm64 etc).

The Lubuntu manual can be found here - https://manual.lubuntu.me/stable/ (see this page if you’re after a specific Lubuntu release manual)

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First off, you almost certainly won’t be able to install Lubuntu directly onto your phone’s hardware. All computers (phones included) have some sort of firmware layer that starts the boot process. PCs generally use BIOS or EFI firmware, while Android phones use something different (something about an “early loader” or some such, you could probably look it up but in short, it’s not BIOS or EFI). The amount of work you would need to do to get an Ubuntu Linux kernel to load on this kind of a system would probably be crazy, you’d most likely brick the phone trying, and to top it all off, phone hardware probably won’t work right with Ubuntu’s drivers, so even if you do succeed, you probably still won’t be able to hardly use the phone when you’re done.

Technically, you might be able to install Lubuntu as a virtual machine on your phone, but this also is probably a bad idea. Unless you have somehow managed to make your phone enable its hardware virtualization features (which from my research is very difficult), the performance will be absolutely miserable.

So what can you do? I’ve had a fairly good experience using an app called Termux in the past. This basically allows you to run a Linux container on top of Android. It doesn’t use typical virtualization technology, so it allows things to run at pretty good speeds. It probably won’t work with GUI apps without a lot of work, but it can run console apps out of the box. This is probably the closest you can get to having a Linux VM on your phone without having to go to incredible lengths to make it work.

Termux is available on the F-Droid store, which is a popular free-and-open-source alternative app store for Android. You probably shouldn’t use the version that exists in Google Play, since I do not believe it’s been updated in a while. You can find the F-Droid store here: https://f-droid.org/

If you do decide to try to run Lubuntu in a virtual machine, you’ll need to start with installing Termux. Then you can install QEMU into that, download the Lubuntu ISO of your choice, create an empty virtual disk, and then boot the ISO with QEMU, attaching the virtual disk so you can install Lubuntu to it. You’ll need to enable QEMU’s VNC server when you start the VM, that way you can connect a VNC app to the VM so you can see the screen. QEMU is a very complicated tool to use, so I won’t dive into the whole procedure here. You should probably get comfortable using it on the command line on a PC before trying this on your phone. If you go this route, you’ll want to have the QEMU user manual to help you out. This is the most helpful page of the manual: Invocation — QEMU documentation

EDIT: Looks like the Termux people actually have an even better way to install Ubuntu onto a phone. They have instructions on how to run other distros within Termux here: PRoot - Termux Wiki If I’m understanding correctly, you can probably install Ubuntu 22.04 using the instructions there, then install lubuntu-desktop, set up a VNC server, and then connect to that. That would be far faster than the above QEMU nightmare. You may have to create a new user account first that isn’t root, so that you can drop to that user account first, then launch the VNC server and connect to it.

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You can install a Linux on a phone under certain circumstances. There are several projects, which try to do this. For example Supported products | UBports.

I had (still have) a BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition which I used years ago. It has the Ubuntu Touch OS installed (maintained by Canonical/Ubuntu). It was very cool, but also very limited in its functionality.

  • Most of the known mobile phone apps are not available.
  • The OS must be “touch-friendly”.
  • The applications must be usable with a small screen.
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