Terminal Emulators

TallyHo

After perusing the forums regarding terminal emulators I must express some dissatisfaction. I'm an old unix guy and I expect to have a command line on my system. On android you can open up debugging and run a shell over adb. But there isn't a basic xterm available on the system to do the exact same thing without a remote connection. Madness.

You can find all kinds of terminal emulators all over the place that want all kinds of crazy permissions and do all kinds of crazy things like installing large chunks of linux but it isn't easy to find a basic command line tool. I've been looking and haven't found one and I don't see anybody recommending one. Madness.

I assume there are security reasons for not making an xterm available but this is inconsistent with an easy path to connect and run adb. And good luck finding any technical discussion about this. Madness.

There are good reasons to have a command line. I ran top through adb shell and immediately noticed my VPN is eating CPU. And that's just the beginning. The GrapheneOS team has prudently refrained from recommending third party apps. But top is native. But I can't run it! Madness.

All of this started because - like many other people - I just want to install code like Google Play on a secondary user and use the primary user (Owner) to "install available apps" for other users - like any sysadmin would do. But I can't do that through the UX unless Owner installed Google Play - exactly what everybody wants to avoid! But I hear you can do it with pm - a shell command! But there's no command line! But you can do it remotely through adb! MADNESS.

If people want to make this a serious and usable thread about terminal emulators then great. Maybe it will serve as a reference. Otherwise I will have to make some compromises. Maybe I'll take a chance with one of these FOSS terminal emulators. Maybe I'll review the source code and perhaps strip out what I don't like - but probably not because I don't want to waste my time that way. I'll probably just cave in and use adb for now. But I hope that this or some other thread will produce the kind of answers that "we" expect - "we" being experienced IT people who don't like moving backwards or dealing with absurd headaches and roadblocks and timewasting. I just want my command line.

Graphite

TallyHo just want to install code like Google Play on a secondary user and use the primary user (Owner) to "install available apps" for other users - like any sysadmin would do. But I can't do that through the UX unless Owner installed Google Play

Not true. I've got Google play on a secondary profile, but not on owner.

TallyHo

Graphite What I said was that Owner can't see it in "Install available apps" unless it is installed in Owner - which I and others prefer not to do even though it is probably safe - but I don't know exactly how it will behave. I know it's not visible because I tried it.

But this "install available apps" limitation is only a UX limitation because the pm (package manager) command can do this from the command line when Owner opens up ADB (debugging) and remotely executes "adb shell 'pm install-existing --user 0 com.example.app'" (so says another post).

That prompted me to look for a terminal emulator to do it locally. Hence my post.

If there were more doc available or clear discussion about it- and there may be but so far I haven't found it - I might be convinced to intall everything into Owner. I would prefer to err on the side of caution until I know better.

I can live without root access and Owner being a half-baked "admin" of sorts but when I am forced to log into Owner at boot then I start getting uncomfortable about installing apps there. Yes, I suppose you can install Google and immediately disable it but that's still bad practice. The Android model is deeply problematic in this regard. Being forced to look to untrusted third-party apps is not a good alternative. A sane solution would be to allow Owner to install apps directly into other user accounts.

unwat

TallyHo

We were able to list apps installed in secondary profiles on the "install available apps" screen for a while, but there were concerns about the way it was set up. Sounds like they'd like to add it again when they come up with a better way to do so.

Here's a quote from the website:

drop our extension to the install available apps feature (which is still available, without this extension) making it work for apps not installed in Owner since this is risky in a situation where there are actually separate people using secondary users and while we want to provide this feature, we'd need to come up with a way to address this to add it back

Hopefully they come up with a good way to implement it safely and add it back again soon.