Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu 165
An anonymous reader notes Ars Technica's report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, where Canonical has unveiled a prototype Android execution environment that will allow Android applications to run on Ubuntu and "potentially other conventional Linux distributions." "Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. Canonical is creating a specialized Android execution environment that could make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu desktops in Xorg alongside regular Linux applications. The execution environment would function like a simulator, providing the infrastructure that is needed to make the applications run. Some technical details about the Android execution environment were presented by Canonical developer Michael Casadevall... They successfully compiled it against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc and they are running it on a regular Ubuntu kernel."
This is where a subject should be (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is where a subject should be (Score:5, Funny)
It might mean that Canonical and Google could share an app store.
gapt?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Canoogle?
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Since UDS is afire with talk about the "App Center" (which has been put on high priority for 9.10), I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Canonical wants to offer Android apps for sale through the App Center.
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Really cool!
When did they add reviews? And where do I submit my app and how do set the price and collect the money?
If you can not do that then it isn't a app store. Store means you buy and sell stuff for money.
If not then it sure isn't an app store.
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Well "app free-as-in-beer store" sounds funny.
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well since a store usually means someplace that you can buy or sell stuff it doesn't apply. Repositories are not an app store it is as simple as that.
I also think Linux needs and app store like the iTunes App store or Steam.
It would allow people to choose between buying an app or getting a free app. Reviews would help one choose which app is worth trying and which are not very good.
It would also improve the variety of software available for Linux Desktops. It could provide a way for FOSS projects to get fun
matters to me (Score:2)
I'm sorry it doesn't matter to you what Ubuntu does, but it does matter to me and probably many other geek-Ubuntu-users. That's probably why it keeps appearing on Slashdot.
And whether and how Ubuntu's app store works is big news; if they unify Android and Ubuntu's application stores, that really gives them a big leg up in the market. That matters to everybody.
If I had the choice (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.
Re:If I had the choice (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.
Yeah we know how well that went [openmoko.com].
Re:If I had the choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe one day phones will become open platforms, but yeah, I'm not gunna hold my breath :)
Re:If I had the choice (Score:4, Interesting)
the problem with this was hardware issues and the fact that the software stack was dumped on the users in such a primitive state (the official line was that it would be worked on as things progressed). a lot of users bought these things expecting them to work out of the box and were disheartened so interest dropped off quickly. with a few hardware issues worked out and a more familiar front end (android or ubuntu) i think it would be an incredibly different story.
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Says who?
Why would that change anything?
It's not as if those 99.9% of the phone buyers that never ever change their phone software, would suddenly hack it, just because it's open source.
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What has OpenMokos pace to do with that it was open source. Those things are unrelated.
If they would have been closed source, they would not have been faster. Rather even slower.
I think the OpenMoko people thought "hey, we just call it open source, and we can let the users do the all the work!"
Well. It does not work like that. You, as a company, still have to hire developers, just like the big companies.
Would they have worked just like Google or Apple, then speed would have been the same, no matter if it's
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What has OpenMokos pace to do with that it was open source. Those things are unrelated.
If they would have been closed source, they would not have been faster. Rather even slower.
Correct.
I think the OpenMoko people thought "hey, we just call it open source, and we can let the users do the all the work!"
Well. It does not work like that. You, as a company, still have to hire developers, just like the big companies.
That is possibly what they thought, and if so they were wrong.
Would they have worked just like Google or Apple, then speed would have been the same, no matter if it's open source.
Dead wrong. If they had had their own developers from the start, they might have attracted enough outside open source dev's for Linus's law to kick in. In which case open source would have been much faster. This really is a tragic story. One company decides to do something the right way, and then they assume that that will carry them with no work at all. End result: other companies and investors are unlikely to try that stunt any tim
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Still in business, still selling the current generation of hardware, still developing the operating system.
It would have been nice for them to continue developing the next generation but the current generation of hardware is still fine.
Sup dawg (Score:2, Funny)
Sup dawg, I herd you like run programs, so I put an operating system in your operating system so you can run programs while you run programs!
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Ow! That was so bad, it did Hurd!
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While I don't care to run ubuntu on my phone (non-ideal UI for the task), what I would like to see is a C API for android.
My phone is SLOW!!! Memory is tight, and applications take forever to switch. The browser is fairly glacial (even when rendering pages that are stored locally in flash so it isn't just the mobile network).
I think that half the problem is Davlik. It is a non-JIT JVM-like implementation (though it isn't really Java).
While I like the app management that android provides, the requirement
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Funny,
but Android has a bunch of hacks meant to deal with running in a phone environment.
My apologies -- there is a video explaining it in more detail but youtube is blocked at work.
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Oh he's funny.
Just not "haw haw" funny.
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lol registry, lol windows.
lol gconf, lol gnome
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U think, its funny you twit?
It happened on the day i had an emergency.
The day i had to catch a train at 6 AM in the morning, and the cab driver hadn't showed up at 5.10AM, and i had to retrieve his number from my Desktop.
I boot up and i see this ugly blue screen.
Man i was so pissed off i could have shot at my PC if i had the time.
It was then i decided no more playing and supporting Linux...
After i returned back, i i tried bringing it up via ACronis secure zone, etc. Nope.
No Linux, No crap. Only Windows 7 64
Netbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
trying not to be a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
What's the point? Most apps use GPS, tilt, and camera that most computers don't have(except for the camera). Those that don't use them are boring calculators and notepads. And even then, for the apps GUI to look right the window is restricted to a 320x480 rectangle or else you wind up with stretched buttons and text boxes.
Future products... (Score:2)
(1) some wacky adventurers may want to wipe Android and run raw ubuntu on the handset - so it will have the same hardware.
(2) support for hardware features may be added in future netbooks. GPS might be emulated via 3G network triangulation, tilt may be added to forthcoming netbook tablets*. And as for the dimensions, run apps in windowed rather than full screen mode...
* Only a matter of time before Asus, Acer & others smash the lucrative tablet PC market.
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Some laptops already have tilt, albiet in a hackish fashion. I can tilt my thinkpad around, using the accelerameter in the harddrive as a joystick.
important lesson (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:important lesson (Score:5, Funny)
Re:important lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows Mobile is a broken OS, even the die hard MS fans know that out of the box its broken, sure, you can add software to make it usable, but a vanilla WinMo device is unusable. The iPhone is restricted to one device and one carrier, Android can run on many and is or soon will be on many different networks. Palm OS is severely outdated, but Web OS which is their replacement already has a strong following and the Pre is set to be the next thing in phones.
If Android was marketed as a full desktop or placed on "real" (ie: x86, full keyboard, decent screen) hardware it wouldn't sell because people won't learn a new OS on what they think is a Windows platform and it won't run some applications.
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Huh, dear troll, care to elaborate how WM is broken out of the box?
Had 2 WM smartphones in the past (WM2002, WM6) and nowhere near I find them broken, although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.
Re:important lesson (Score:5, Informative)
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They don't have an app store
Great point! Instead there are many stores and places you can download whatever app you want and then install as you wish. Shame on Microsoft.
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Great point! Instead there are many stores and places you can download whatever app you want and then install as you wish.
Unless all mobile phone carriers that service the area where you live and work enable software restriction policies on the phones that they offer. Granted, it's more likely to happen in the United States than in mainland Europe, but the United States is two-thirds of the English-speaking market.
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By that standard there isn't a single OS on the market, whether desktop or mobile, that isn't broken.
Which is why you choose the least broken one among the ones available to you.
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Even Microsoft employees would rather have an iPhone than Windows Mobile. [allthingsd.com]
Re:important lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
how WM is broken out of the box?
although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.
There is a clue right there.
This is a view I find among Windows users a lot. (I support Windows for a living, servers and Desktops - XP, Vista and even the odd Win2k box and the other day I actually came across an office PC running Win98SE - eek)
The view is this - "Windows is not broken - it runs fine after installing all this, and doing that, and tweaking this, oh and don't forget the Firewall and Antivirus... look, no more crashes!"
The moment Linux comes up in the conversation (they usually ask after watching me troubleshoot the network from my laptop - Ubuntu, or whatever takes my fancy) they have this idea that it takes a lot of tinkering to get it to run properly.
From personal experience I have found a modern Linux distro takes about the same effort to get running to a users liking as would a typical Windows install. The effort is usually expended in different areas over the lifetime of the install as opposed to Windows - but it takes some effort both ways.
On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either. What seems a common theme with Windows installs are general slowing down over the life of the install, random Virus issues that needs to have an eye kept on it, MS updates that break stuff.
With Linux I find that the slowing down over time is not as obvious, if at all, and update related breakages are less common.
But Windows Users will happily spend hours to tinker with a Windows box, but the moment a Linux install needs some effort they throw their hands in the air and yell "This will never be ready!"
Linux drivers don't come on CDs (Score:2)
On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either.
And under Linux, you just have to pitch some hardware because there is no driver and no hope of getting the manufacturer's help in making a driver. For example, the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner has gone unsupported in SANE for years. Windows, on the other hand, almost guarantees that you can use a driver from the enclosed CD.
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Okay, so one scanner does not work, an old scanner. Show me hardware from pre XP days and I can find examples in that group that do not work under XP.
Also you conveniently forget the driver nightmare that was (and still is!) windows Vista.
Lexmark is an example of bad hardware support by a vendor for Linux.
Now the obvious question: How is this linux's fault?
But that is the attitude out there isn't it? My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course
Fault != problem (Score:2)
Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?
It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.
My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available
So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver
But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.
Re:Fault != problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?
It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.
I agree. But the problem is not as large as you seem to make it out to be. Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?
My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.
I struggle to understand exactly what you are getting at here. Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
While it is wrong for people to place the blame elsewhere (i.e. at Linux's door) it is a symptom of the way Operating Systems are perceived. Windows = Right, Linux = Not Right.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available
So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card) I have needed to get the broadcom driver from the repo, and once I got alerted that my internal wintel modem had a proprietary driver available.
For my USB LG WIFI card I could install with NdisWrapper the driver that is available on the CD, though the NdisWrapper was not always available in a clean install. With Ubuntu I needed to downloaded NdisWrapper, with Mint and Mandrive I had a NdisWrapper driver available.
Using my phone as a GPRS modem (Nokia) I came right with KDE based environments without Internet Access because KPPP supported it without the need to download anything.
Lately with UBUNTU 3g cards work out of the box, no drivers needed.
Previously I did one of two things - took my laptop to an internet cafe to download and install everything I needed driver wise via LAN (this was usually limited to a broadcom WIFI driver, and once to KPPP for Ubuntu) or I got the repo's on DVD from a local LUG for free and installed everything I needed from there.
Shipit, from Canonical, also provides the base install for free via e-mail. It is a pain though that Ubuntu does not have mainstream codec support by default though.
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver
But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.
"Vast Majority Of Hardware" is a very strong statement. You will have to support it because I can count the unsupported hardware that I needed (or need) to download hardware for on one had.
1. Broadcom Wifi Card.
2. Wacom Tablet (now supported out of the box with Karmic Koala)
3. Nvidia Proprietary drivers.
4. My Microdia Webcam - works fine BTW.
5. Internal Intel software modem.
Honorable mention: Ndiswrapper (not technically a driver - but I'll add it here in any case since it enables the using of the hardware driver) (also not true with all distributions)
And hardware that completely fails to work with Linux.
Lexmark Printers - Some have claimed to have gotten these to work properly.
My one friend has a music centre (amplifier, auto drum set, sound board) that he had to fiddle around with to work - no official support. He is a musician and us
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Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?
I agree, less of a problem. But there is a threshold where a user can walk into Best Buy and expect to walk out with a known-working printer without having to use a different printer to print up the HCL.
Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
Ba
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Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.
Oh that is a pain - I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all - ever tried getting stuff to work on BSD?? Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
Back in the Red Hat Linux 6 days (that's 2000, not RHEL 6 which isn't out yet), I had to download and install a kernel module to let me use the Lucent winmodem in my Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop. This is probably because winmodem drivers are non-free, which in turn is because v.90 is patented. And how does "never" meet your "Internal Intel software modem"?
I also played around with Red Hat 6 back in the day. Don't get me started on that. Thankfully Linux has come a long way since then. Oh and Mandrake Linux - remember the Wizard?
And you got me on the modem - I have never needed to use it, so my "Never needed to" will translate to som
Why Mac OS X != FreeBSD (Score:2)
I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all
For one thing, Mac OS X has a more stable kernel ABI, compared to the Linux kernel ABI that changes on purpose to make life harder for developers of non-free drivers. For another, drivers for some peripherals run in user mode and thus sit on top of the NeXTstep-style parts of Mac OS X, not on top of the BSD subsystem.
Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.
If everyone ran GNUstep, not GNOME or KDE or Xfce, you might have a point.
And if you are at a place of work surely you should have access to at least one company/techie who is worth his salt and can make sure your hardware works with your software?
I am that person. But we bought a lot of hardware before I came to the company, back when it was still a 100% Windows s
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One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.
Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.
You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.
Ah but you say that you c
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Fair enough - you raise some good points, I will address them below.
One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.
Why? If a binary blob can be downloaded and installed then it can be put on a cd.
Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.
A cd can hold 700mb of data. Even if a driver is 100mb a CD can hold the .deb, .rpm, source.tgz, Windows XP .exe, Windows Vista .exe and maybe even a Win2k/Mac installer and still have 100mb left for the autorun, pdf reader and other goodies (bloatware) for Windows.
You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.
Well what you are referring to is dependency hell. If you are not a Red-Hat fan you will call it
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And if the driver is for the network card how do you download it? What about if it is for the SATA controller? Or even the motherboard chipset? Sometimes you can not download the driver. But how you get the driver on the system isn't really the issue here.
You don't really understand Linux drivers. Even small kernel changes currently can break a driver. There is no way to create a binary driver and put it on a website or CD and besure that it will work with any given distro.
It isn't just about RPMs and Debs
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I am in support, and let me tell you, one of the things you do is download the newest driver from the vendor's website. Why is it OK do do this for Windows and not for Linux?
Because you need the old version of the driver for a network card on your system to get to the vendor's website in order to download the latest driver. Even if a WLAN driver supports only 802.11b and not g or n, or 10BASE-T and not 100BASE-TX or Gigabit, 802.11b or 10BASE-T is still a fat enough pipe to get a driver down.
Donated hardware (Score:2)
I'll say it again: You have to buy hardware that works right in Linux
In other words, you have to choose Linux before you choose to buy hardware, not afterward. That makes it much more expensive for a current user of Windows to switch to Linux than it would otherwise be. I owned the scanner in question before I tried installing Linux on the PC.
just as you have to buy hardware that works right in Mac OS X
There's a logo on the front of the box of hardware that comes with a Mac OS X driver. There's no logo and no driver for Linux.
Most (all?) of the Canon LIDE scanners are fully supported under SANE.
Had I known that I would eventually want to switch to Linux before I bought my scanner, I might have bought a
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Ever heard of [pencil] and [paper]?
So I have a list of hundreds of supported printers. But I don't know which ones are in stock at the local Best Buy store, and there are too many models for me to jot down.
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I don't think this proves anything. Android has a bit of buzz around it, but there are so few handsets commercially available using it that it's popularity is impossible to gauge. It's a bit like saying the iPhone proves that people prefer OS X, but only if you remove the dock.
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There's millions and millions of them out there.
It might be a small number compared to the handheld market itself, but it's definitely a large enough sample for most metrics.
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Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X. There are more gray market iPhones in China than there are Android devices in the whole world. And going to Ubuntu from OS X is like going back in time at least 10 years. There is no need to sugar coat it. The Linux community has spent the last 10 years sniffing Microsoft's tailpipe, reinventing the Start menu over and over again. The business community is drowning in Microsoft's turn-of-the-century bilge and the Linux community has yet to meet the opp
Mac OS to OS X: "inventing" '70s features? (Score:2)
the Linux community has yet to meet the opportunity with an office platform that does for Windows what OS X did for Mac OS.
Didn't NT (2000, XP) implement memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking? Didn't Unix do those in the '70s? Didn't Linux do those from day 1?
Or do you mean the symmetric multiprocessing that was added in OS X? I hear that Linux already does that.
I haven't owned a Mac, and I have only used them in the early '90s, so maybe I'm not the most qualified person to talk here*.
But... what are the major features that OS X has, that neither of OS 9, Linux nor Windows has?
* I'm not an Apple hater or an MS hater
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I couldn't agree more. I still run FreeBSD for CLI servers (Samba, Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc) but GUI support for UNIX takes the UNIX model of one-app-for-one-purpose past the breaking point. There's just too many components and too much 1970s configuration relative to Windows or MacOS.
Why can't the windowing manager and the display driver be merged together instead of seperate components? I guess many like it that way, but IMHO, it's just too much of a hack.
Speed? (Score:2)
Re:Speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
> According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a
> real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks.
Sounds more like a shim than a simulator.
> Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real
> one and native libs, etc?
Not a kernel, no. It might be better to run in a chroot and use the Android libraries, though. Perhaps that is what they are doing.
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According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks. Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real one and native libs, etc? I know it might be hard to do and would have security problems, but it seems a lot faster that way.
I'm not sure if it is emulated or not, but even if it's slow to run an app, a desktop likely has a much faster processor than the phone the app was designed to run on, so it would probably be fine normally.
-Taylor
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Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
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Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu (Score:2, Interesting)
I even heard mint Linux have graphics cards such as nvidia working on their platform but Ubuntu has not.
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hibernate works (well its a horribly designed hack on all linux but it works)
suspend varies by computer, but for most it works (occasionally the screen will not resume on some chipsets, but that is being worked on)
mint is ubuntu but with a couple of extra repos and prop drivers by default.
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Which makes it all the more frustrating. It may not be pretty and it wont please RMS but it will benefit people.
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suspend varies by computer, but for most it works (occasionally the screen will not resume on some chipsets, but that is being worked on)
I don't count it as "working" if I can't get the sound volume to go past 0 without a restart. Ubuntu Hardy on Eee PC 900.
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You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.
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You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.
They are good at polishing things up though.
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You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya?
So why aren't all the other distros the same as Ubuntu?
Polish? Integration? Patches sent to upstream? Notification system? All these things count as 'work' in my book.
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Yes, absolutely, they do.. except for the whole patches upstream part.. last I heard, that doesn't actually happen. Bug reports upstream, sure.
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Yes, absolutely, they do.. except for the whole patches upstream part.. last I heard, that doesn't actually happen. Bug reports upstream, sure.
Oh, you heard did you? Want to provide us with a link [phunnypharm.org] to back up your assertion?
Here's a choice quote from my link:
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...because mr ubuntu can only ever work on one thing at a time...
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Suspend and hibernate work for men. nVidia and ATI cards work on all my laptops and desktops.
I think Ubuntu currently has some of the best hardware support around. They're doing as well as one can, given that they have little support from manufacturers. I don't think more effort in this area would even make much of a difference.
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I haven't actually upgraded to 9.04 (haven't been using the notebook) but suspend is definitely broken for me in 8.10 - it never wakes up. I get a BSoaVS (black screen of a vegitative state). So it could be he came from March 2009 with that comment, not 2005. Hardly trolling, unless you were referring to your own post.
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My anecdotal experience trumps your anecdotal experience.
And Google doesn't get Sued? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think that was over MS putting a non-compatible VM in the OS and calling it Java.
I get the impression that this has more to do with having the libs stripped and replaced.
Re:And Google doesn't get Sued? (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't marketing the Android environment as Java. That's the key difference.
Microsoft had their own implementation of Java (the VM and the language), which wasn't entirely compatible with Sun's, had additional features that were only present in Microsoft's implementation, and lots of Windows-only libraries. It implemented only a subset of Sun's Java specification, and didn't pass the test suites. They still called it Java, and encouraged developers to use their implementation instead of Sun's. Their development environment and documentation led you straight to using Microsoft's implementations of everything, rather than Sun's, and their made it very hard for developers to tell if their application could run on Sun's VM as well. So in effect, they created their own distinct version of Java, with applications written for one implementation being incompatible with the other, but still called it Java, and still tried to benefit from Sun's Java marketing (including the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise). Basically, they tried to usurp the platform, while still using Sun's trademarked Java name to market it. Sun really had no choice but to sue.
Microsoft's Java implementation lived on after that, under the name "J++", and later as "Visual J#". They no longer position it as "Java", but as a Java-language compiler for .NET.
Google, on the other hand, don't mention Java anywhere. You're not writing Java applications - you're writing Android applications. Those applications happen to be written using the Java programming language, and execute inside a Java VM, but that's just an implementation detail. Their main website doesn't mention Java. The first few pages of their developer site don't mention Java, until you get to the page detailing the requirements for running the SDK. They make no attempt to claim that their implementation is Java, or even compatible. They make it clear that Java applications don't work on Android, and Android applications don't work on standard Java.
Re: (Score:2)
It turns out Sun had a fit about MS Java because MS really was trying to destroy it.
See the groklaw [groklaw.net] link for the summary. Poor Bill Gates said he was kept awake at night worrying about this competitor!
I see the attitude towards Google already starting to change, compared to how they were received as perfect in every way when they started out. As long as they don't act like MS has done in the pages of lawsuit after lawsuit, then I don't care so much if they do become more monopolistic. they'll be just anothe
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Java wasn't opensourced back then. There's a not-so-subtle difference here:
I take your specs for a platform, implement them, and extend them with some proprietary APIs that I make sure are valuable for developers but won't run on your platform.
This is meant to kill your product's unique advantage: its ability to run everywhere, which I consider a threat to the monopoly of another product I develop: an operating system.
Next, I make my platform the standard on said operating system by bundling and leveragin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Android allows developers to write applications using the Java language but doesn't claim to be compatible with either the Java SE or ME platforms. Nor does it license any code from Sun or OpenJDK.
Developer tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically Eclipse. Android's developer plugin requires Eclipse 3.3 or higher [android.com], whereas Ubuntu comes with 3.2 [ubuntu.com]. I don't know the technical details of why packaging eclipse in
Sure, one can download it manually but it kinda defeats the purpose of having a package manager for such scenarios.
Re:Developer tools - eclipse died in Debian (Score:2, Informative)
The primary problem is that eclipse is not being actively maintained upstream in Debian. It is in some ways rather hard to package which has to be actively maintained much like firefox, and nobody has stepped up to take it over. If nothing changes, I would not be surprised to see eclipse eventually dropped in Debian and by extension in Ubuntu.
Re: (Score:2)
Well I guess if Canonical sees value, as I suggested, in providing developer assistance for this new Ubuntu-Android partnership they would be an ideal candidate to take upstream ownership, given no-one else has.
Re: (Score:2)
good (Score:2)
I think this is a really great effort.
I hope Android can meet them half way by making Android itself more compliant with Linux standards. Android is nice what it is, but it remains a very specialized platform. Interoperating better might be good for its acceptance as well.
I just noticed something: (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments.
I can't find this Ok, but object to Microsoft doing the same thing wit Java back when they were making their own version, and got (rightfully) sued for it.
If it's a custom compiler, I think they should not call it Java anymore. If it's a custom Library, it should be a portable library, that can be used on any Java system.
What do you think? :)
(Please, no fanboyism.
already been done (Score:2)
android has already been hacked onto non-google hardware using a variety of linux distros including poky, angstrom and ubuntu.
the news first broke in January at linuxdevices [linuxdevices.com]
Re: (Score:2)
it sure as hell could ease development, at least for casual users. Developing in the same environment you run in, followed by porting it to whatever you /really/ want to run it on, has always been my preferred method*
*when the environments are closely compatible, which this seems will be the case.
Re: (Score:2)
Spam on slashdot. Good call. You probably just got added to thousands of admin's web filters.