Get your Linux box connected to Android

Being a fan of open source, you’re familiar with Android. Not only familiar with it, but you’re also aware that Android is built on Linux, and that technically helps make Linux the world’s top operating system based on installed devices. It follows that since both of these are Linux, they should work famously together.

This is true, but unfortunately there are some caveats. There are a number of ways to make Android get on well with your Linux rig, but you’ll have to roll up your sleeves a bit to make some of them work. In this article we’ll first take a look at Android as a Linux-based operating system: how it’s structured, where the ‘Linux’ pieces come into play, and what’s uniquely Android. Then we’ll explore a couple ways to get some simple integrations up and running, such as logging into a shell, transferring files or viewing notifications.

Structure of an Android

The easiest way to understand how Android equals Linux is to understand how your favourite distro achieves the same thing. As you should be aware, Linux is a kernel, not an operating system – at least not all by itself. The Linux kernel can talk to all your device’s hardware and shuffle data back and forth between storage, RAM and processor, among others.

But it’s software that requests the kernel does all this work, and that’s where other organisations like the GNU Project comes in. What started out as a collection of humble (but important!) utilities like , and has morphed into the Gnome desktop environment and the image editor. But whether it’s