There are currently two ways for running SWI-Prolog on Android. Using Termux we can do so without rooting the device. This is probably the best and the subject of this page

This page describes the using LinuxOnAndroid, which provides a complete Linux userland on your Android device running in a chroot environment alongside Android. The installation requires rooting your device.

This procedure was tested on a Samsung GT-P5110 (Tab 2 10.1) running Android 4.1.2.

Install Linux onto the target

I used LinuxOnAndroid. This first requires you to root your device, which took most of the time. Of course, all the usual `at your own risk' applies. I installed Ubuntu 12.10.

Install the requirements

This is very similar a normal build on Debian/Ubuntu. I left out JPL (Java), ODBC, ssl and utf8proc, but I see no reason why this would fail.

Find a place for SWI-Prolog

The Ubuntu image itself is rather full (although it will fit). Using the external sdcard will not work because it is formatted as FAT32 and mounted with the noexec flag. If you have enough space, use a directory on the internal sdcard. Else, what I did, was to make 2 partitions on the external sdcard. The first is a FAT32 one that will be used by Android. The second can be formatted with a Linux filesystem and mounted. This is the easiest way to get more Linux native space that I could find as it does not require any changes to the Android system initialization.

P.s. With the above packages stripped and without C debug symbols, you need about 300Mb free space.

Building SWI-Prolog

There should be no issues building 6.4.x or 6.5.x. Just follow the standard procedure. You can set MAKE=make --jobs=2 to use the two cores of your tablet.

Tips

• LinuxOnAndroid advices the use of androidVNC for accessing the Ubuntu subsystem. This is quite cumbersome for interaction with PceEmacs because Alt and Ctrl do not work. I installed Jump.
• Hacker's keyboard is also quite useful.
• To do some real work, you'll need a real mouse and external keyboard.

Conclusions

With an external mouse and keyboard, it works quite ok. Speed on CHAT80 is about 1 million inferences/sec, or about 1/8 of my Intel i7 desktop. You can run the HTTP services and thus develop HTML5 apps that run entirely on your Android. I think this should work on any device on which you can install Linux alongside Android.

See also

- Termux.md for an Android port without rooting.