The application is an installer of the latest version BusyBox for Android. The application contains a BusyBox assembly for various hardware architectures and is the assembly with the most complete set of functions, 335 applets are currently supported (for busybox v1.23.2). The application allows you to install BusyBox in the system or remove the one already installed. It is possible to select the installation directory and installation mode (with the installation of applets, with or without replacing existing applets). Also, the assembly can be saved to the memory card in the form of a zip archive for subsequent installation through a recovery.

The application appeared because of the current difficult situation with the update of time zones in Android. The International Time Zone Database is updated every month, but there are no regular means of updating this database on devices. Keep track of time zone updates and release timely firmware updates, in theory, should device manufacturers, but in fact it is not. As a result, Timezone Updater was developed, which downloads and updates to the latest version of the time zone data on the Android device. The time zone database and ICU data are updated. This application is designed to solve all the known problems associated with time zones in Android.

Since version 1.5.3, Linux Deploy has begun work on integrating GNU/Linux containers with the Android environment. This opens up the following possibilities:

• access to the entire Android file system;
• execution of Android applications/commands directly from the container (for example, getprop, reboot, shutdown);
• switching between the container console and Android (unchroot command).

The Linux Deploy project (LD for short) is now three years old, and here are some statistics. The current version of LD 1.5.2-160 is 52 releases and 160 updates, GitHub has 18,805 lines of code. More than 10,000 devices have been supported since Android 2.1. About 500 thousand installations. At the moment, LD supports 8 distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware), for which installers and configurators are specially written. Each distribution supports from 2 to 9 architectures (varieties arm and x86, 32 and 64 bits) and from 1 to 7 releases. A total of 121 versions of distributions and their architectures are supported. Each distribution can be automatically configured to work with 1 of 5 supported desktop environments (XTerm, LXDE, Xfce, GNOME, KDE), not to mention SSH, VNC, and Xorg configurations. Taking into account the desktop environments (distribution/architecture/desktop environment), 597 installation options are obtained, which can be automatically deployed and configured via LD.

Modern models of mobile devices are equipped with a significant amount of RAM, for example, the ThL 5000 has 2 GB of RAM and 1 GB of swap memory. The Android system and system applications use no more than 1 GB of RAM. Thus, there is still at least 1 GB of memory that can be used for their own purposes. Linux Deploy version 1.5.1 adds support for installing GNU/Linux distributions in RAM.

One evening I decided to relax and made an animated version of the piglet for the Linux terminal, and then in JavaScript. The piglet itself is the logo of the networked open source intrusion detection and prevention system Snort.

The code to run in the shell and the web version: https://github.com/meefik/piggy

Linux Deploy uses VNC as the default graphics subsystem, as the most native remote access to the GNU/Linux desktop system. However, you can configure remote access via the RDP protocol used in MS Windows operating systems. The example uses the Ubuntu 12.04 distribution (Precise Pangolin), but with minor changes this will work in other distributions. In this case, the RDP will run on top of the VNC server, so it is required that it be installed. In Linux Deploy, the VNC server is installed by default.

In addition to the graphical interface, Linux Deploy allows you to manage a GNU/Linux system instance from the command line via the Android terminal emulator. For these purposes, a special linuxdeploy script is used, which can be run from the Android command line and accepts the following parameters:

• prepare - Prepare a container, create an image, and create a file system;
• mount - Mount the container;
• umount - Unmount the container;
• install - Start the installation of a new system;
• configure - Launch the container reconfiguration;
• start - Launch the container;
• stop - Stop the container;
• shell - Execute chroot in a container;
• status - Information about the system.

Distributions running through Linux Deploy work with the Android kernel (a modified Linux kernel), and therefore you can change the configuration of the kernel or connect new modules only by rebuilding this kernel, or assembling modules for this version of the kernel.

Linux Deploy is designed to automatically install the latest versions of the most popular Linux distributions via the Internet and then run Linux applications of these distributions on Android. However, it also supports running the distribution from ready-made images. Prepared images of distributions can be downloaded from the Linux-on-Android project website.