Introduction

sarchile

Simple Arch Linux on mobile is a hobby project, a set of scripts and images aiming to help technology enthusiasts quickly deploy Arch Linux on their aarch64 Android phone.

It's based on Termux as interactor to Android system, with help of proot to call system for execution.

Everything is done inside Termux app storage and root permission is not required so you can work without being afraid of destroying your phone.

sarchile came up as an idea of replacement for proot-distro and TermuxArch.

proot-distro is incredibly... slow because the base images aren't pure. xeffyr bloated them with preinstalled unnecessary packages, kernels(?) and patches(??). We had opened an issue and responses from xeffyr was very rude and uncollaborative. proot isn't that slow and we replaced images URLs in shell scripts to official ones, the results were incredibly satisfied us.

TermuxArch, on the other hand is a bit messed up in many ways. Their documents aren't clear and codes/scripts are over complicated just for deploying Arch Linux in Termux.

We have also spotted another toolkit for deploying Linux container on Android (still non-root) with better performance and less hassle. We expected to have it on hand for development from Late 2023.