Roid: an easy Void Linux desktop installation toolkit for Termux environments on top of Android OS

The Roid toolkit allows you to turn any Android device that can run Termux and Termux-X11 into a full-featured Void Linux desktop PC.

Only tested on ARM64. Other hardware platforms may or may not work.

Note: Roid is now GUI-oriented only. For a much better CLI experience, please switch to ri instead of Roid, e.g. run it with curl -fsSL luxferre.top/ri | sh.

Features

• Full (glibc-based) Void Linux installation for your smartphone/tablet architecture (usually ARM64)
• Convenient shell aliases inside the environment (see .roidrc)
• Sound support out of the box (via PulseAudio)
• A set of development tools out of the box (GCC, Make, Autotools, Perl, Tcl, Python, Janet, S-Lang, Lua, Expect etc)
• 3D-accelerated X11 GUI desktop environment (i3, st-sx, Fira Code, Noto Fonts etc)

Prerequisites

• Android 8 or later.
• At least 4.5 GiB of free space on the device.
• Termux installed and prepared with termux-change-repo and termux-setup-storage. It's also strongly recommended to select "Acquire wakelock" in the notification drawer and to run pkg upgrade -y before starting the installation.
• Termux-X11 installed from GH releases. Note: not all Android flavors are supported by Termux-X11.
• Git installed within Termux itself: pkg install -y git

Note: with the exception of Termux-X11 and Git, the same prerequisites apply to running ri.

Installation

Run from within the Termux shell:

git clone --depth 1 https://codeberg.org/luxferre/roid.git ~/roid
sh ~/roid/install

After the process completes, you need to fully exit the Termux shell and re-enter it before you can start Void Linux.

Usage

1. Open Termux-X11 in the background.
2. Switch to Termux (make sure the wakelock is on!) and type voidgui to enter the desktop.
3. Switch to Termux-X11 to start using the environment.
4. Terminate the desktop session and exit to Termux with Mod4+Shift+E or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Alternatively, you can type void to enter CLI and then run startx (here, it's an alias) and proceed as usual. In this case, the Void shell will still be there in Termux when you terminate the desktop session.

Having at least an external keyboard connected to your device is highly recommended for better desktop experience. Both keyboard and mouse are preferred even more.

After exiting the Void Linux shell and before exiting Termux, it's advisable to run the roidclean command to stop the PulseAudio and 3D acceleration servers.

Uninstallation

To fully uninstall Void Linux set up by Roid, exit the Void session and then run either this:

roidclean
pd remove void-glibc-full
sed -i '/ROID_INST/d' ~/.profile
sed -i '/ROID_INST/d' ~/.bashrc
pkg remove -y proot-distro pulseaudio x11-repo termux-x11-nightly virglrenderer-android
apt autoremove -y
exit

or this (if you still have the original ~/roid directory in place):

sh ~/roid/uninstall
rm -rf ~/roid
exit

Upon re-entering the Termux shell, no traces of the installation should be found.

Credits

Created by Luxferre in 2026, released into the public domain with no warranties.