How to install Termux with .NET 8.0 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS PRoot Distro

Ubuntu 23.10 and later recently packaged all of the .NET 8.0 packages or later that were available in Microsoft’s public repositories. Although it was proven to be extremely difficult to package for because the build system uses the Internet and the Debian Packaging Guidelines explicitly stated that no package in the main archive may use a build system that downloads its dependencies from the Internet, Microsoft has managed to do the impossible to upload their packages to the official Ubuntu repositories under the Universe category.

The official Microsoft repository only provided packages for .NET 8.0 SDK and Runtime for the AMD64 systems, while the Ubuntu repos provided packages for the same framework for two platforms: AMD64 and ARM64.

Installation

To install Termux with .NET 8.0, you must have an ARM64 Android device running Android 7.0 or later. ARMHF devices are not supported this way. Follow these steps:

1. Install Termux to your phone or tablet
2. Open Termux, and update all the packages using “pkg upgrade“
3. Use “pkg install proot-distro“
4. Once the proot-distro program is successfully installed, install the Ubuntu 24.04 distro using “proot-distro install ubuntu“
5. Upon installation, start the distro up using the “proot-distro login ubuntu” command
6. Run “apt update” and “apt dist-upgrade” to update all packages, if any (recommended)
7. Now, run “apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0″ if you want to build software (but see warning below) or “apt install dotnet-runtime-8.0″ if you want to run software built for .NET 8.0
8. Optionally, you can set up a VNC server (apt install tigervnc-standalone-server tigervnc-xorg-extension) that starts your favorite window manager (i3, bspwm, fluxbox, etc.) up. After you set it up, you must connect to “127.0.0.1:5901” using a VNC app (bVNC or RealVNC). This is recommended for complex interactive applications, especially GUI apps.

Once you install dotnet successfully, you should be able to run the dotnet command. For example, we’re able to run KS on Android:

WARNING: You may not be able to build .NET projects, because csc.dll errors out with exit code 139 (SIGSEGV – Segmentation Violation) as per our testing. Workarounds can be found in the yellow warning box on this page.

Three hints for you

• Run “dotnet path/to/software.dll args” to run a .NET 8.0 program.
• Run “dotnet new console” to make a new console project
• Run “dotnet build MyProject.csproj” or “dotnet build MySolution.sln” to build a program