ZShaolin :: ZSH on Android

The Android ZSH powerup

ZShaolin unleashes the power of GNU/Linux on your Android phone or tablet by installing a small and powerful shell environment.

It comes with applications to edit images, audio and video using batch scripts one can write and upload. It does not require rooting, not even an Internet connection to work.

Why a console terminal on Android? considered the power of phone and tablets today, limiting yourself to rub a touchscreen is like spending time cuddling a tiger…

…pretty cute, but hey! is that all there is!?

What you will find in ZShaolin:

• FFMpeg to convert, decode and encode audio and video files
• ImageMagick to convert and manipulate all image formats
• Sox to manipulate and convert audio files
• OggZ for the manipulation of DRM free audio/video (Ogg/Vorbis/Theora)
• LUA scripting language
• GNU Awk, Sed, Grep and the awesome Z-Shell
• … and even more small tools to make your life easier when using Android from terminal (full list with exact versions at bottom of this page)

Documentation

If you are new to the console terminal then you can start reading this manual about the command line, which is also available in Spanish.

If you are wondering what is better in Zsh compared to other shells, then find more about it on wikipedia and on the Zsh users wiki. ZShaolin comes with this fantastic shell pre-configured to speed up its usage with many aliases and macros here you can download a reference card of shortcuts (borrowed from the Grml distribution).

If you have ninja-powers with computers, ZShaolin gives you the ninja tools on Android.

You will find more details about image manipulation possibilities in the ImageMagick scripting documentation.

For audio manipulation refer to the SoX documentation.

For the video manipulation there is the FFMpeg documentation.

And never forget to ask your geek friends for help, scripting together can be a lot of fun!

Development of ZShaolin started recently. It can grow with your support, that’s why we are selling it for a coin on the Android Market. Meanwhile, all the sourcecode of ZShaolin is free and opensource, also the toolchain used to build it is made available for download on our FTP, so if you really want this app without paying then you can grab it and build it yourself…

If you like to join development of this project, let us know.

List of software in ZShaolin version 0.4

• curl-7.24.0
• diffutils-3.2
• ffmpeg-0.10
• flac-1.2.1
• gawk-4.0.0
• grep-2.9
• htop-1.0
• ImageMagick-6.7.4-10
• libogg-1.3.0
• liboggz-1.1.1
• libvorbis-1.3.2
• lua-5.2.0
• nano-2.2.6
• ncurses-5.9
• netcat-0.7.1
• sed-4.2.1
• sox-14.3.2
• speex-1.2rc1
• x264-snapshot-20120126-2245
• zlib-1.2.5
• zsh-4.3.15

 Credits

This application re-distributes the works of many talented developers: it would have never been possible to have ZShaolin without them. While it is impossible to list all names here, you should consider ZShaolin as made by several hundreds of people in about 10 to 20 years time. At the bottom of this list, the maintainer of ZShaolin is Jaromil.

For the Android app, special thanks go to Jack Palevich for the terminal emulator and to Spartacus Rex for the system installer.

This webpage will be updated stating the income of app sales on the Android Market, which will be all reinvested in projects aimed to port more console tools to Android and in general to preserve the value of what was developed in many years of free and open source software based on GNU/Linux.