You may have an old unused Android-powered phone lying around, or you may have a set-top box which remains unused most of the time, so you want to make it to work also as a home WEB-server. Maybe you are geeky enough for an idea of carrying a Linux-powered server in your pocket. Or you would like to improve the functionality of your Android phone to include a package manager which simplifies installation of a large number of server-side software and development tools. These are only the reasons for installing Entware on an Android-powered device I can imagine. Everyone can have his or her reasons for doing so.

However, installing Entware on Android might be not straightforward. Initially, I planned to write a guide on how-to get Entware running on a device rooted using Magisk.

To my shame, the guide turned out to be complicated and error-prone. To save you from the hassle, I decided to reuse my findings and code and developed a module for Magisk which you can find on Github. Installing Entware using this module is as straightforward as possible, but for now, it supports only devices on which the root file system is a RAM-drive (rootfs). Unfortunately, this rules out most of the recent devices released with Android 9 and newer (so-called "system-as-root" devices). On these devices, the root file system is a real partition, so you need to manually modify it before using the module because Magisk does not currently provide a facility to make reversible modifications to directories outside of "/system."

I do not want to repeat myself in this post because I wrote hopefully complete documentation for the module. If you happen to have a newer device where the root file system is not a RAM-drive, I mentioned there the modifications which you might want to make before the installation.

Hopefully, I will get this module into the official Magisk modules repository at some point. Now you can install it manually, as described in the documentation.

Happy Entware installation!