Is it possible to run desktop Linux CLI programs in Android?
 

Ok, I have a possibly stupid question. Actually, probably stupid question, but I thought it might be worth asking.

I use the CAS program Maxima on my laptop and desktop at home. I've come to really like it, so I decided to search for CAS software for Android, only to find that selection for this particular kind of software is abysmal. (There's a program called "CAS For Android" that doesn't even have a CLI, and a CLI is necessary for a halfway decent CAS.)

So, I thought, there are several terminal "emulators" for Android, and it'd be really cool if I could just install Maxima through the CLI and use it without any kind of GUI (because I don't really need a GUI that much). Of course, I have no idea to what extent those emulators are really emulators. Are they like VMs of a CLI Linux distro? Or are they just CLI file explorers? (Personally, I'd love a VM of a CLI version of Debian or Ubuntu on my phone, but that may just be me, lol.) But, the bottom line is, can it be done?

I've never installed anything from source before, but I'd be willing to learn if it meant that I could use Maxima on my phone. I'm kind of guessing that the answer is "no," but I thought I might as well ask.

Thanks for tolerating a weird question, lol.

Do you need to run Maxima on the phone, or can you use your phone as a conduit to a machine running Maxima? The reason I'm asking is that ConnectBot is a very good SSH client for Android, and using that you could connect to an SSH server and get your command line access that way.

Android is a completely different Operating System. Yes, it uses the Linux kernel (well, a fork of it, actually), but the userland is completely different (not GNU). So Hangdog42's suggestion is probably the best/easiest way to achieve what you want.

That's kind of what I was expecting, unfortunately, I was just hoping that the Terminal Emulators were actually emulating a Linux OS instead of just a CLI file explorer.

I've never done that before, but when I get the time to, I'll see about teaching myself how to do it.

Thanks for the help!

Alms for the poor, links for the ignorant
 

The context above probably makes these unnecessary, but here they are anyway:
CAS
Maxima

It almost never hurts to make potentially unfamiliar terms links to definitions or info.