I got copies of busybox dropbear bash wget and such that can be used from the connectbot shell to let me pretend that I have a real linux machine with me. Dropbear allows me to connect to it from another computer via ssh, so I can use a real keyboard... I think I mentioned in the BPDN page that I also installed a working su on that machine.
There is a poor clone of wget that comes with busybox, but for my purposes, I wanted the full featured tool.