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Running Android On Netbooks
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Jan 03, 2009 09:32 AM
from the more-portable-than-portable dept.
from the more-portable-than-portable dept.
jjohn_h writes "Two guys at VentureBeat have managed to take the source code for Google's Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, Android, and compile it for an Asus netbook. Immediately, speculation began that Android will soon be running on PCs and laptops. '... we discovered that Android already has two product "policies" in its code. Product policies are operating system directions aimed at specific uses. The two policies are for 1) phones and 2) mobile internet devices.' Though some remain skeptical, I surely hope it is going to happen. Since Android does not rely on X11, but has its own framebuffer graphics, that would indeed be a cosmic shift."
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Star Wars IV : (Score:5, Funny)
A new hope
Perfect for in-dash navigational systems... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I see the utility for phones, I'm not sure that the Android UI as currently implemented would be as flexible as X11 for computer-type applications...
On the other hand, it's great for stuff like car GPSs, where a very simple, touch-based UI is ideal. Something you can lean over while driving to use. Get directions. Make a phone call. Quick check of email (while filling the tank..)
Android seems perfect for stuff like that, but for normal everyday computing... why?
Re:Perfect for in-dash navigational systems... (Score:4, Insightful)
Same reason you run NetBSD on your toaster: because you can. That, and I imagine it'd be more comfortable to test apps on a netbook than on a phone, thanks to the larger screen and real keyboard.
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Re:Perfect for in-dash navigational systems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then use your PC, the devkit comes with a phone emulator.
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2009: The year of Android on the desktop. (Score:5, Funny)
What? Someone has to change the meme sometimes.
Hurm. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for hacking stuff for the whole 'because we can' mentality, but why reinvent the wheel? Why not use something like Ubuntu Netbook Remix - which already does everything Android can do + more. If you want to get Linux more in the mainstream market, let's try to refine what we already have, and leave the netbook version of Android to the professionals - aka Google.
Re:Hurm. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the app-store is important to the kool-aid drinkers that believed Apple when they said "No, we only reject apps from our device/profit model to keep you safe."
The same kool-aid enthusiasts that shuffled off from the shareware-hell that was the Windows/DOS environment for the last 15 years or so.
There was once a world that didn't recognize this as logical. These days, they are keeping themselves busy with actual problems, enough so that even raising a 1-finger salute to your line of thinking is likely unworthy of their effort.
But hey, consume, consume, consume, man. I'm sure someone appreciates it.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
All nice and dandy, but why force people to use a signed, possibly locked-down firmware binary? To keep people 'safe'?
If a web-of-trust is what you seek, why not stick to something like Debian's keyring?
Also, why have a single, commercial company have censorship of what goes into the app-store and what not? I'd rather have something like the popularity-contest package do the voting and ranking for me.
Re:Hurm. (Score:5, Insightful)
why have a single, commercial company have censorship of what goes into the app-store
Because a single, commercial company creates and maintains the product which the same single, commercial company is also liable for in terms of company image, damage to devices, even overflow of support calls causing penalties on their service contracts with subcontractors.
If you don't like it, you don't buy an iphone. This is like saying "Why is XBox Live the only XBox 360 online gaming service!". To put it into the overused car analogies, why would Ferrari support third party machined components in their catalogues? At least Apple is allowing for the third party components, it just requires approval first.
Or if you're still strung out over this, going by app popularity and the whole support/liability angle, think of the number of people who STILL install those "magic cursors" and "Bonzo Buddy" type idiocies.
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Re:Hurm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a single, commercial company creates and maintains the product which the same single, commercial company is also liable for in terms of company image, damage to devices, even overflow of support calls causing penalties on their service contracts with subcontractors.
A single commercial company also maintains Windows Mobile. On a WinMo device, the user is given root access, full permissions to fuck with the filesystem/registry and install any application that she wants. Moreover, WinMo applications don't need to be approved by anyone, you just download the SDK (C++ or C#, your choice) and write the app and package it as a file. Send the file to anyone you want, host it free on the web, sell it for $1000000/copy, barter it for live chickens...
Compare this to Android, where the user doesn't have root access and is locked out the filesystem. The Android developer is similarly fucked -- she can't just package his application as a file and send it off to whoever but must submit it for approval and then, if the overlords deign to approve, can only distribute it through their app store.
It's ironic, in some sick and twisted sense, that an OS built on open source affords the user and developer so much less freedom than one built on closed source by the much-maligned Microsoft.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
*cough [andappstore.com]* *cough [handango.com]* *wheeze [google.com]*
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No it isn't stupid, you haven't bothered to understand what it's for. The signing simply authenticates apps as coming from a particular person or organization, it doesn't make any assertions about that person or organization. The point is to ensure one developer can't "upgrade" his competitors app with a broken version, etc. It's all about sandboxing.
Mod me down (Score:3, Informative)
I was mistaken about some key facts. I apologize for the inconvenience (and for having been modded Insightful despite being incorrect).
I still have some strong misgivings about the Android software dev model (including the fact that you can't make a proper tethering application because the API doesn't expose the packet gubbins) but this appears to be OK.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's App Store is a revolution in easily adding functionality to a cell phone. If Google can replicate it it will be huge for them. If not, it will be a major impediment.
Having 10,000+ apps, many of them free or $0.99, all available in a trusted, easy-to-access, categorized, searchable and peer-reviewed place is valuable. Sure, there are now a dozen or more "fart sound" and "flashlight" apps, but there are also some really innovative things (like "please name the song that's playing in this restaurant
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
He's talking about an app like Pandora, which records any sound source, sends it to a sever, and attempts to recognise the song. You can't do that or anything similar via SMS. SMS services require a radio station or place to have an agreement with the service, it's not the same thing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I recall correctly, the self-build versions of Android cannot connect to the app-store.
Who needs the app-store? We'll build a new one. If this effort materializes, the Open Source Android code will be adequately modified to connect to a newly built "app-store." Then at this moment, all the rest will be history.
My only hope will be that every application in the new app-store works as advertised and better than what is currently available on the Linux desktop.
My other hope is that at that time, we in the Linux desktop world will have learned that "too much choice breeds confusion" which we have
Re:Hurm. (Score:4, Informative)
Have you tried Netbook Remix? I have and I just did not get on with it, mainly because its been stripped down too far. Especially annoying was a lack of reiserfs support, which I'd taken to using due to the ability of ext2/3 to lose everything on an sd card under certain circumstances.
But Some people must like it. Surprisingly OSX runs quite well on a netbook, I took a triple booting hdd from a laptop and found the osx and ubuntu installs both booted up fine (Xp didn't but thats MS for you) I soon got wireless working on OSX using an Edimax usb card with a ralink 2500 chipset. It's certainly responsive enough but then again the Macbook Air has a 1.6 dual core CPU so a 1.6 atom isn't that much poorer (the image had been used on a 1.4 Celeron without issues).
Now we find that Android is also a possibility for a netbook, isnt that cool. So much choice, ok there are issues to be resolved for OSX (apart from legal ones) and also for Android and less so for Ubuntu and other Linux versions. XP works quite well, 2000 is good but no webcam driver.
quick google finds
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/12/22/atom-support-now-in-opensolaris/ [intel.com]
and http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] This second link has a picture of a EEE running opensolaris.
How can you not love having lots of options available, I am so tempted to build a collection of images to use with my netbooks.
choice is good very good :)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
reiser on SD cards? holy wear leveling, batman...
Re:Hurm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux is all about reinventing the wheel. FOSS is all about reinventing the wheel.
Quite the opposite, actually. Proprietary software is all about reinventing the wheel and then selling it under sufficiently restrictively terms that everyone else is forced to reinvent the wheel.
For example, no more than about 10% of all proprietary Windows applications use standard Win32 widgets, the vast majority prefer to roll their own instead. Not even Microsoft uses their own interface libraries, just compare IE 7, WMP (anything after 6.4) and any version of MS Office or Visual Studio released this century.
In sharp contrast, all of the apps on my KDE desktop use standard KDE/Qt widgets, the only exceptions being apps that were originally proprietary (Blender, OpenOffice and Firefox).
Parent
Downside... (Score:5, Informative)
As much as so many people seem to hate X (many for no particularly well found technical reason I will add, some have technical justifications, but many just think it's 'old'), Android would not be an improvement in display or UI technology for desktop usage:
-No inherent remote display capabilities. X has this in it's very foundation. There was no reason for a cell-phone/embedded OS to implement such functionality in the contexts Android target, so this wasn't a bad decision.
-Multi-window operation. Again, the target is applications where the resolution, screen size, and interface methods do not lend themselves well for multiple windows. As such the paradigm is single application.
-Extending from the above, no advanced window management/compositing. The inter-application effects and utility with 3D acceleration found in Compiz, Aero, and Quartz have no reason to be there, despite providing productivity benefits (at least in the compiz and Quartz variants).
Do not get excited about the prospect of any arbitrary display technology displacing X, regardless of the underlying technical merits in the given context. Try to understand the hard technical reasons for your X hate, and do a bit of research to make sure they are not FUD or that the Xorg team isn't already addressing your concerns in a reasonable manner.
From what I've tried, Android is a great platform for the environment it targets. It achieves this by not trying to be a one-size fits all solution. Usage styles that work on the desktop do not scale to handheld devices. By the same token, good handheld UI does not scale to Desktop.
Re:Downside... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes.
xrandr -s 1024x768
or your favorite graphical utility for KDE or Gnome.
That's been around for a while, by the way.
Parent
Re:Downside... (Score:5, Funny)
can you change the resolution of your cellphone screen without changing your cell phone?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But, how else are you going to get your fancy new Dell laptop to interface with a 1980s sync-on-green 17" 350lbs Sun console monitor? :)
That's why the 99.99999% of linux users who have VESA-compliant plug-and-play monitors manufactured in the last 25 years have configuration files that contain modelines.
Netbooks and the death of the word processor (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as office workers are concerned, the last 20 years can be seen as a terrible mistake. The problem is, basically, Office. It's interesting, reading discussions on Slashdot, to see people defending things like Word because OOo can't exactly reproduce the (usually visually illiterate) exact form of a Word document. The great majority of people in offices need to create files containing relatively transitory information, possibly with a shelf life of less than a day. Yet they spend absolutely hours fiddling with formatting and decoration, and thinking that thereby they are in some way adding value. Salesmen and people in marketing spend lots of time messing around with Powerpoint producing crappy presentations, and think that somehow this makes their message more convincing (perhaps at a subliminal level one corporate drone is influenced by the presentations of another, but education should be able to fix that.)
Email came as a huge relief - so immediately Microsoft tried to extend email with formatting features to convert a text medium into a presentation medium, or turn it into a vehicle to shuttle Office documents around the Internet.
The rise and rise of the netbook creates an opportunity to get rid of some of this shit. The netbook and the e-reader work well with plain black text on a white ground conveying information in a neutral way that allows it to be consciously read and analysed. They don't work well with overblown office applications.
On the other hand they do work very well for delivering basic search, mapping, information retrieval and messaging, and Chrome works very well as a browser on netbooks (I run Firefox on my corporate laptop and Chrome on my netbook because it is just easier that way.)
The cost of hardware is now so low that it probably makes more sense to have multiple single function devices than a general purpose PC again. The current obstacle to this is the cost of operating systems and the perceived need for Office. Get rid of most of this, and manufacturers can stop making minute variations on a theme and produce optimised devices - like why do I need top end sound or 3D on my photo editor, where what I want is reliable colour output from high res monitors and accurate rendition of color from the print drivers?
Re:Netbooks and the death of the word processor (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think visually appealing documents can so easily be dismissed, especially in marketing and sales as you mention. The world we live in is obsessed with visual/multimedia stimuli and to not utilize these tools would result in an almost certain loss of effectiveness.
I do, however, agree that the vast majority of people spend far too much time on these appearance things. I would also say that the majority of people overrate themselves in their talents in this area.
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No, I agree, they are needed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2)
I agree with part of what you said - simplicity.
Text editors need not be all things for all people, that's for emacs.
I un-fondly remember the years when it became blatantly obvious MS was tangling their products and operating systems in a bid to become irreplaceable. They quickly lost sight of the real reason these products were created and eventual chaos followed.
It is nice in a way though, it validates the principle that things that are created with the intention of serving the customer first and not the
Please port to OLPC / XO! (Score:2, Funny)
...for the children!
What's wrong with X? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an old Zaurus SL-5500 PDA with 64MB of memory, and I run X on it continuously. X adds so much functionality, why would anyone choose a framebuffer-based display instead?
It's like saying "now we don't have to use a word processor anymore, we can run notepad!"
Re: (Score:2)
Why waste battery power with lots of extra junk that is hardly ever used?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing's wrong with X, but people hate things they don't understand, and most people perceive X as old and complicated, therefore it must be junk. It doesn't matter if it's the best solution for the problem at hand.
Why the X hate? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious what your reasons are for wanting rid of X?
There's innovation.. (Score:3, Insightful)
And then there is trying to be different for the sake of being different.
Too many people seem to think if it remotely resembles in some way technology they have already seen, it must be antiquated and stale. In the framework of being Unix-like, GNU and Linux can be found in consumer routers, high-end networking equipment, servers, cell-phones, DVRs, other set-top boxes, the list goes on. Each field with a highly customized and frequently innovative stack on top of familiar Unix-like concepts. Underneath
Hmmm. So what about a virtual machine appliance? (Score:4, Interesting)
I run linux distros frequently on virtual machines because I can configure an efficient, low footprint purpose specific "appliance". It seems to me that a modern system specifically designed to run on actual appliances would be even better.
As a developer I use virtual machines for testing (of course) but also to package up certain software services like databases or application servers that I don't need all the time. Rather than install them on a real machine, I make a copy of a generic virtual appliance and install to that.
One thing that I've always thought that would make sense is to confine all one's risky operations, such as web browsing, to a virtual machine. But on most host machines the overhead of an entire virtual machine, both in memory and startup time, make it not quite convenient to do so. A much smaller, but still up to date machine might change this. Android requires as a minimum 32MB of RAM and 32MB of flash. This is small enough overhead to justify a virtual machine for a single process.
Actually, I'd like to use a really minimal operating system as the virtual machine host as well. I'd like to be able organize my entire "workspace" in to severable, portable pieces joined by a virtual network. If I'm ever forced to deal with an issue like incompatible versions of glibc in the future, I could contain that; or if I want to try upgrading a piece of software, I can roll back to a snapshot or keep multiple copies of the virtual appliance around. In that case, I'd like to have the host operating system be as minimal as possible.
Re:Hmmm. So what about a virtual machine appliance (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is different from X11 how exactly ? This is why unix like OS's use the concept of servers. It becomes transparent to the network because it is intrinsically network based in the first place. There is nothing stopping you from installing Damn Small or Puppy Linux as the machine host then virtu
on $99 Acer with built-in 3G (Score:2)
Now take this a step further, and install it on one of those Acer Inspire One's advertized the week before Xmas for $99 by Radio Shack. Yeah I know, it isn't a real deal considering the plan you've to buy as well. That would be the right form factor for "mobile full-screen Android".
Re: (Score:2)
Oops ... I meant the Acer Aspire One of course.
but where is the GPS (Score:2)
Critical component still missing is of course the built-in GPS. Because AA1s don't have built-in BlueTooth, you still need a dongle :-(. In this case not for your 3G connectivity, but for either a BT transmitter/receiver or for a USB cabled GPS.
If you've ever played with a mobile device that combines both 3G and GPS, all built-in, you never want to go back anymore!!
So will Android work on the OLPC (XO laptop)? (Score:2)
has been done before (Score:5, Informative)
oh well, only two weeks earlier .... :-)
seriously, here is the link to a similar building-android-for-the-asus-eeepc-701 [virtuallyshocking.com] project, with detailed instructions on how to do it yourself
Re:has been done before (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
OMG! Linux runs on Notebook (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd much rather have Android on my laptop then Vista.
Why on earth would you install Vista if you already had Android installed? Presumably the laptop would come with Vista, rather than the other way around, wouldn't it?
Even if you're talking about dual-booting, I've found it's always easier to install Windows first, then Linux - makes setting up your bootloader much more straightforward.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Why on earth would you install Vista.
There, fixed it for you.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:This will be a very good thing (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, just add the repositories in Synaptic. But of course, the CLI method is actually easier to explain.
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Re:Ohh really! (Score:4, Insightful)
...and you sound like an Apple fanboy. Do you think that popularity = better? Then following this logic Windows is way better than any OS out there.
Apple could have put any product out, make it a bit better than Windows and still win. Heck, Apple at its core is BSD. BSD and Linux are not that different. Apple is successful because of the support thrown behind the platform. Because people can go to any store buy a webcam or a printer and see on the installation CD "OS requirement: Windows or Mac" same with software not because it has only one desktop environment.
Heck, people could not even buy a computer with Linux installed from a big company till very recently. Have you heard of netbooks? They are very popular and not one of them comes with Mac OS X. Unfortunately for some strange reasons companies that make netbooks decided to install the crappiest Linux distributions that exist on them and limit what people can do with them.
But you didn't actually responded to my points, you only challenged me to say why Macs are more popular... that doesn't make you initial points any more valid. They are based on fallacies and myths.
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Re: (Score:2)
I am afraid you sound just like another Linux fanboy. Listen, your approach has not worked that well in 10 years! Apple came in with a new platform and kicked your *you know what* in terms of penetration.
No, they didn't. Apple still hasn't achieved more market share than Linux and Linux is getting a much bigger boost right now here in Europe.
And who the fuck cares about compatibility? You think all your Win95 programs work in Vista or vice-versa? Or a program compiled for Linux 0.99 works in Ubuntu 8.10? If you go with the times, buy a new PC. With OS X and iLife come most programs the average user will need in his lifetime, safe maybe for an Office Suite.
And who's the fanboi here ej? You're just spouting
Re: (Score:2)
Alternatively, you could stick with "standard" Linux (like DSL [damnsmalllinux.org] on your SBC and then run another GUI than X11 + Gnome/KDE/etc. I played five years ago with an Agenda PDA [linuxdevices.com] (remember those??), which was running a tiny Linux with FLTK [fltk.org] (Fast Light ToolKit, pronounced "fulltick") on top. Developing in FLTK was very straightforward, which is probably important for your Industrial Contol application. And it is pretty portable, I ran the same applications on my Agenda PDA, a Linux Desktop or on my Windows PC.
Now you