Old Androids and Small Shells

2025-11-03

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I have two devices that are stuck on very old versions of Android. Those are my Tauon PC-1, which runs Nougat, and my second-generation Amazon Fire TV Stick, which runs Lollipop. I use a terminal on all of my Android devices, but neither of these is conducive to using Termux: the Fire Stick has a poor UI for it, and the PC-1 only has about 5 GB of free internal storage for all user apps combined. Instead, I installed Busybox and a terminal emulator called TermOne Plus.

This is an odd Unix paradigm for me. The shell included with TermOne Plus has fewer features than Bash, and Busybox's utilities are rather basic compared to GNU coreutils. Many programs I'm used to using are nowhere to be found. And critically, neither device has a compiler I can use to build what's missing.

For the last few years I've developed a script that manages an offline microjournal. I've tested the script on many platforms, including OpenBSD, Linux and macOS, but I've never tried it in such a small embedded system. I'm curious to see where there might be bugs, and how I can optimize the script's performance for small-footprint machines.

On the plus side, TermOne Plus and Busybox add a lot of needed functionality, especially to the PC-1. The OS dates to 2021 and is not Internet-ready out of the box, due to the expiration of a root certificate. Having a shell allowed me to implement a workaround by loading the necessary certificate manually, at which point I could connect to CAs online and update all the others. That alone made the terminal invaluable.

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[Last updated: 2025-11-03]