How to install a .deb file in Ubuntu-Touch?

Question

How can I install a .deb file in Ubuntu-Touch?

Answer 1

While technically you can download a .deb and install it, it's probably not a good idea in many instances.

You need to make the phone read-write (it ships read-only by default) which is not a good idea for most non-developers because the archive used for the phone isn't the full archive, so you may not even find the deb you want. We don't test apt-get installed scenarios on the phone and if you use apt-get upgrade, you may install packages which haven't yet been fully tested as part of image based updates.

That said, you can make the phone read-write:-

adb shell
sudo mount -o remount,rw /

You can then install a deb using usual tools:-

sudo dpkg -i PackageName.deb

However, you can break the phone and may need to re-flash from scratch if it breaks.