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Running Android On Netbooks
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."
A new hope
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?
I'd much rather have Android on my laptop then Vista. This would be a great alternative to Ubuntu on net books and laptops as well. If google started to put Android on shelves, I'd be one of the first in line to get it.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
What? Someone has to change the meme sometimes.
If I recall correctly, the self-build versions of Android cannot connect to the app-store. Although still lacking in many areas, the app-store is one of the biggest selling points for Android. Without it, you arn't able to easily add your own applications - a major no-no if you want this to be mainstream. This will fix itself once we get Google-built and signed firmware images for different netbooks.
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.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...for the children!
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!"
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I'm curious what your reasons are for wanting rid of X?
I wonder if there would be some utility in porting Android to work under frameworks such as OpenEmbedded, or just as a developer's kit that can be deployed to some of the various ARM SBCs. Hook your SBC to a small LCD panel/touchscreen and you've got a nice platform for Industrial control and all manner of "ambient devices". I'm guessing the framebuffer system of Android would be lighter weight than X.
Please mod parent as flamebait.
But I'll bite.
1. Yes, this is the Linux problem *rolls eyes* How do you know? Have you conducted a study? My simple guess is that people don't switch to Linux because their programs don't work in Linux and also because many don't go on changing their OS (some people don't know how to change the browser, heck some people call IE "the Internet") And how do you plan to solve this "problem" kill the developers that make other desktop environments, force people to use only one?
2. How Linux users realizing that people are different and that some are computer illiterate would change the "problem of Linux on desktop"?
3. Yes, simplicity is good, Linux is just as simple as Windows, you don't HAVE TO use the CLI, but it's simpler to explain if there's a problem, instead of "Open that program, move the mouse to "File" click, then go to the 3rd tab, select the 1,5, and 9 boxes" it's easier to say "type this in console". Moreover this is a myth, you don't NEED CLI in Linux, take Ubuntu for example you can do everything in GUI. I am not aware of anything important for which you need the CLI and there's no GUI alternative. But even in Windows you need sometime to edit files and to use "Run Command"
4. Music works on my box. Period.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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".
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
I bought an OLPC (XO) on an impulse and well I hate the interface that it comes with. What are your guys thoughts on if Android will work on the XO laptop? I use mine primarily as a rugged ebook reader for outdoors and light web browsing.
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!!
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
...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.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
The may have changed it since the last time I used Ubuntu, but opening up third party repositories required (or at least was explained in the how-tos) using both the command line and config file editing.
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 virtualising everything else.
oh well, only two weeks earlier .... :-)
seriously, here is the link to a similar building-android-for-the-asus-eeepc-701 project, with detailed instructions on how to do it yourself
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Nope, just add the repositories in Synaptic. But of course, the CLI method is actually easier to explain.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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 logical fallacies and crap around. at_slashdot didn't post any flamebait...
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
AndAppStore.com for one, and their client can be bundled with any distro so why would you want to create another one?
Al Sutton
I was referring to the majority of office users. Production of high quality documents, presentations and training materials requires a high skill level. I was complaining about the people who think that having the right program is a substitute for those skills, resulting in poor quality being the norm rather than the exception. How many managers really need PowerPoint to present misapplied statistics and add clip art to a boring diatribe?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You can change number of monitors spanned, resolution, orientatation. The only one that it may lack is changing color depth dynamically (not sure), but then again, people don't generally have reason to change that in X.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apple took an existing platform and adapted it to insulate the user from the mechanics. If Microsoft were to do the same, what would that do to your relative "penetration" ?
Penetration is only relevant in the minds of people who seek to dominate a market. Linux is free, the market is not relevant - merely existence is enough. Would you agree that it would be wrong to make language or independent thought proprietary ? If so, why are you advocating exactly that ? What does it matter to you that I choose to work in an xterm or compile from source ? Communication is key, not the tools used to communicate. Evolution depends on many different organisms existing independently, not top down imposition of arbitrary end results. Most users of OSX do so because they don't know any different - Apple said buy so they did as they were told. I don't care how fucking shiny it is. They are in it to protect their business model and that's that. When the music industry does the same, everybody screams blue murder, but if Apple does it suddenly it's cool.
GNU/Linux is based on altruism and you can't get a better foundation that that. It truly is the peoples OS, even if they don't realise it yet.
Beware of those who seek to take care of you lest your caretakers become your jailers. (Jim Rohn)
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. (Samuel Adams)
Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it. (Albert Einstein)
The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. (Herbert Spencer)
Beware those who seek to control knowledge, for they already see themselves your master. (unknown)
etc, etc.
I'm stoked. Can they name it GnuGoogle? I get a kick as it is from the reaction I get from people when I tell them I use Ubuntu. ;p
Microsofts remote desktop and NX and vnc lack one thing I'd like, application integration with my desktop. Meaning even the "tray" presence of an application melds with everything else. I know some hacks have applications interleaved in other windows, but to date remote applications with the exception of X do not manage to get into the same "tray" my local applications get into. I hear of a NX rootless mode, but I've never actually figured out how to try it. A rootless NX session with detach capabilities may be my holy grail, but the other solutions, as it stands, don't have the required visibility into the details to make it happen (correct me if I am wrong about RDP/Netmeeting).
Just as screen's existence does not obviate the need for ssh, NX's work complements X's architecture, it does replace it.
I agree with you that accommodating high-latency links and session management are two aspects the core Xorg server lacks, but the underlying technology is fundamentally amenable to achieve those ends through additions.
Finally, the question is what ends will be achieved by a replacement technology that Xorg has not achieved itself. I've seens hosts of projects come and go with the aim of implementing some featureset that X lacks, sometimes claiming it's not even possible to address the need through extending X. The problem is by the time they can get off the ground, Xorg has implemented an extension to accommodate the need.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I for one am really exited about it, and expected Google to get into the OS market. It's something different even though it's linux it doesn't run GNOME, KDE, or Xfce so it's different in that sense. Now add an app store with free, and non free apps...I am in heaven. Of course this would be ideal for netbooks but I don't see it much on notebooks and desktops.
It's a great achievement, but is it useful? I have a G1 and Android is great there because the G1 is not big enough for a full desktop (physically or resource wise).
I also have an XO, eee PC (701), and Aspire One. I run Xubuntu and Ubuntu on them because they can handle it. Running Android on those machines would hobble them.
_Needing_ virtual machines just shows the OS wasn't designed properly in the first place. What would be better would be an OS designed to be networked in the first place so you could run any application or part of it on any host in a group of networked devices.
I'd heard Apple users were into that kind of thing.
You and others like you are hell-bent on defending X11, but it's a fucking dinosaur. It should be scrapped and recoded from scratch, using modern techniques.
Why is it so hard to find a simple mechanism/steps to follow for unlocking G1 phones to use on any carrier/network? After all its a GSM phone?
Currently you need to pay USD23 for unlock - and no one is sure if it will work.
To those who don't want X, can't you all just init 3 and stop complaining? It's what I do for my servers that I only SSH into.
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
If anyone knows why my comments recently started appearing with score 1, despite "Excellent" karma, I'd love to hear.
You show with a starting score of 1 and a karma bonus modifier of +1 here for a total of 2 - what I would expect with Excellent karma.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Hmmm... Java browsers anyone?
-- Sig down
not to mention, GUI tends to change more frequently than the CLI and to best explain GUI operations one needs screenshots, which use more bandwidth, storage space and need to be kept up to date if the GUI changes at all.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
The thing about the multi-window paradigm is it gives the user the choice. As you say, you can just maximize anyway, and alt-tab or whatever to switch. The ability to operate otherwise may be ignored if you wish.
However, I make use of the screen real estate. When programming, I'll have documentation up concurrently. I don't have to ask the computer to switch contexts for me, I just look over. When doing some work, I may need to tail a log file so I'll notice and instantly process the data when it happens. Sometimes, I leave windows up, stuck to the workspace and on top to remind me that I need to get back to it as soon as it is ready for interaction while I move on. Very frequently, I arbitrarily need to link together two disparate parts of two applications due to a correlation between them neither developer would have intended. Often, I need a specific viewport and can disregard parts allowing me to achieve what I want through control of the overlap.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
800x480 is still a lot of resolution compared to the G1. And an important difference here is that the netbook has a huge screen in physical size compared to a phone. It may have better aggregate resolution, but the DPI being horrible points to a different style of interaction.
A phone tends to have less resolution, but in an even tinier form factor. That means your applications are designed for a 3" display that happens to be pretty good in terms of DPI. If you had 2560x1600 on a 3" display, you still wouldn't stick gobs of windows and icons into it, you'd just have a really crisp small application.
The reality would be a netbook equipped with Android would be an oversized cell-phone. It wouldn't offer anything meaningfully advantageous over a cell phone (same apps, same amount of data, happens to be bigger), without the portability of the cell phone. If the netbook vision/market is one that resonates best with a UI like Android, then it is doomed to fade away immediately in the face of equivalent phones.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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 it all, there exists a filesystem with same-old devnodes, with shell commands and a filesystem hierarchy that is familiar. To tinker with that just because the concepts are decades old would be akin to saying "hey, round wheels have been in use for centuries, let's put some triangular wheels in our next model to break out of that rut!". My experience suggests there aren't any particularly more compelling ideas at this level to date, and interesting concepts built upon these layers are not held back by any particular aspects of them. The only thing that change for the sake of being 'new' will do is make it hard to follow without sufficient benefit.
In your context, Xorg isn't the origin of your perceived troubles, the developers of applications on top of it are. I doubt you'd be satisfied with a one-app-at-a-time desktop environment, so you'd probably be hoping for someone else to port or create a desktop UI in the event of an Android push to the desktop, with no particular reason why it wouldn't come to the same results you don't like. Maybe you want to tinker with GNUstep, ROX, XFCE, or ratpoison, I'm not sure what you like and can't speak to your tastes. Though many of those may not be sufficient as it stands, but perhaps one jives with you and you'd contribute to advancing its state. There are no shortage of UI concepts to try without going down the Gnome/KDE path. A fleshed out GNUstep on top of Xorg, for example, could feel identical to OSX UI, despite being on top of the 'old and crufty, unix-like UI architecture'.
In terms of moving millions of units instead of hundred of thousands, that is precisely what Android is doing. Android is a purpose-build platform and is a very interesting platform for that market. In terms of displacing Microsoft on the desktop without migrating users from that form factor, Android won't do that. Users are, by and large, content with the paradigm that Apple, MS, and most Linux distributions provide. To ask them to radically change what they do will not win them over.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And I suspect you don't actually know what you are talking about. What is it about X, specifically, at the protocol level, that makes it 'a fucking dinosaur'?
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
Why not use chroot/jails/containers/etc? The multiple kernel instances serve only to add overhead (trust me, I did virtualization and it suffered signigifcant performance degradation within a host). The performance may have had more to do with VM-host networking speed, but I'm much happier with the latter.
If you had to bridge OS types, that is another matter, but the user experience per VM can not converge (Windows will have drive letters, other's won't, Applications won't transparently interleave, etc).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
2004 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
2005 is the year of Linux on the desktop..
2006 is the year of Linux on the desktop...
2007 is the year of Linux on the desktop....
2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop.....
Screw all this waiting I predict that "2009 is the year of Android on the desktop".
Maybe this has more chance of happening...
Nice thoughts, but when you start linking in dependencies, shared resources, etc.. you're in for a world of hurt. I'd say the complexity of setting up a packaging and partitioning system like this would be along the lines of what SELinux does for security.
The only advantage that I could see from this is that we may need yet-another-packaging-system to help organize installations, so we may be able to convince every Linux provider to use the same packaging format / layout.
Bye!
Architecture-wise, is junkware. If you know Java a little, try to understand their Parcelable fine invention. According to which, every class (and every class contained in it) that you want to pass to your application views, need to have its own ad-hoc serializeable methods. But wait, you think ... Java already has its own Serializable, and comes for free by the JVM. Well, *they*, being very smart, decided that Java Serializable where to be too easy, and they invented that piece of shit of Parcelable, that does not come for free.
How genius?
especially in a written medium like the net.
i find it funny to compare a book on cisco routers with a book on windows server.
the cisco one is line after line of text, except for the odd illustration of how the network they base their examples on look like.
the windows one? like a picture book for kids, with numbered markings on each dialog windows elements...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
and if one want a gui, there is always ascii art interfaces ;)
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I have some problems with Android right now. I've been replying to this idea (Android Netbooks) in other places, as it seems everyone is talking about it today :-)
There are certain things I have to "not do" on Android right now, that cause me to switch over to my desktop or my Samsung Q1 Ultra (with Ubuntu UMPC, don't worry, I haven't gone over to the darkside). These are all things I find annoying when I can't do them on my phone, but that I would find to be absolutely necessary on a netbook (or desktop). These are:
1) Google Reader - add/edit tags for an article, add subscriptions, change subscription settings. Also, there are some "UI shortcomings" on the Android version: lack of shortcuts, lack of "total article count" at the top of the article list.
2) Gmail - add/edit filters and labels, "filter messages like this", "send as" one of my other registered email addresses.
3) Google Docs - last I checked, Android doesn't support full read/write of Google Docs. I'm also not sure if it will fully display PDFs, Word, and Excel documents. What I would want is all of that, plus some ability to sync the various Android notes and tasks/to-do lists into some level of Google App (there's a new tasks/todo feature in Gmail or Google Calendar, so that's one option, and then just adding plain text and rich text support to Google Docs would probably handle the rest, along with a sync utility for the Android notepad and todo apps).
4) I haven't been able to get VNC Viewer and SSH (connectbot) to work together. This would be a "novelty" on my phone, but a necessity on a netbook or tablet. Further, on a netbook, I'm going to want to export my display some how (manipulate the netbook from my desktop) -- I do this on my Samsung, for example. But I mainly run the VNC server on my samsung because the software for mirroring the display out to the external VGA port is kind of broken (what it does: want to step down to 800x600 resolution; what it should do: display the 1024x600 screen with letter boxing on the 1024x768 screen).
5) The built-in IM client doesn't allow you to use non-Google Jabber accounts, nor IRC. I would want both of those handled. And I'm not sure the UI is ideal for managing multiple conversations. Further, I would want to be able to log conversations to plain text files on an SD card or something.
6) SyncML client for Calendar data. Funambol gives you SyncML client for contacts, but that doesn't help me with my work calendar server :-)
If those things got handled, I'd be interested in an Android netbook. And that's not a huge/insurmountable list.
Ideally, if they were to put it on a convertible/tablet netbook (like the Fujitsu U820), 7-8.9 screen (has to fit in my Maxpedition Colossus gear bag), at least an 800×480 resolution, at least one SDHC card slot, at least 1 USB Host port (external keyboard/mouse, hopefully OTG support), with an supported internal 3G option (such as a usable PCI-Express Mini card slot, with available antenna), and obviously wifi, I'd buy it. Bonus if it can charge and share its data via a USB client port.
Am I the only one surprised by the fact that Linux could run on an Asus notebook? ;)
Try BSD?
Have you considered chRoot environments under Linux?
Most of your requests are covered there:
- Risk avoidance
- Custom library versions
- Lightweight, No VM library duplication overhead
- Runs any app the "host" can
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Some people LIKE to type on those old Smith and Wessons.
Coronas. I mean Coronas.
(ahem. Nothing to obscure the point more than a stray allusion.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
With the addition of uvcvideo and gpsca usb webcam drivers most webcams should be supported in Linux distros released in the past 4 or so months. Assuming you tried an extremely new distro which webcam was not working?
AMEN.
(I'm looking at you, Bill Gates.)
And you can say that again.
And you can say that again.
Well said. Except, well, it kind of makes me feel a little queazy to admit it, but they are adding value. Wasting time can be a valuable thing.
Think about the last time you got stuck on a really hairy problem and were spinning your wheels. How did you get out of the mental quicksand?
One caveat I'll interject here is that there are more and less productive ways to waste one's time, and MSOffice, I think, has become one of the less productive ways, by way of bloat. Too many questionable communication practices enshrined in code.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Most people have lost that personal war by the time they rise in management ranks.
Well, yeah. But ASCII (and it's progeny, Unicode) seriously needs reworking. (I'm a bit of a fanatic about this. Tag characters should be context-free parseable, we shouldn't have to alias the alphabet and base 64, and the folding together of all the supposedly Chinese ideographic language contexts was a mistake of the level and kind that trying to fold Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic together would have been, except with much larger character sets.)
Yeah. And, more in specific, the wirelessly connected netbook.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I use notepad you insensitive clod, and I like it.
You are missing the point. The point is to have different self-contained virtual machines which are secure from each other, and are packaged in such a way I could drag one onto a thumb drive and use it on a completely different machine without installing anything other than the virtual machine software.
For example, my personal browsing doesn't really need to be tightly coupled with my development work, so they can go on different machines. When a security hole undermines the browser, it doesn't effect my development work. Or my laptop gets dropped, so pop an external drive with a backup of my work environment onto my desktop and checkout the latest source code without having to install and configure everything. Or I am looking at migrating work between different platform versions, so I make a copy of the virtual machine and upgrade the copy to see what would happen, without touching my production machine.
You could use X windows to make using the machines seamless if you like.
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I've used chroot, but it is not really an iron clad security solution. For example, if the root is compromised, then the chroot environment is as well. Another example is your idea that (a) the chroot environment is lighteight because it does not duplicate libraries yet (b) the environments are isolated from each other. You can have one or the other.
In any case, chrooting doesn't get you the fast system restore benefits of virtualization. I can keep my personal browsing vm on a keychain, and if it's undermined I just go to a backup and add the security patches. I can back up my work to an external drive as a system, and be up and running instantly after my laptop is destroyed.
Really "lightweight" is in the mind of the beholder. Unless you are doing something really disk intensive, it's better to spend disk space than time.
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The problem I had was that the VM console was not a convenient way to use apps, and 'remote' X and such performed noticeably worse than local due to the performance of the virtual network bridge and two IP stacks being significantly worse than a local Unix socket X usually uses.
chroot I did not advocate as security, so much as library isolation, so any funky library requirements are met. However, lxc is certainly more comprehensive for this sort of activity.
BTW, don't know why you would say anything special would have to be done for 32-bit in a 64-bit env. All the OSes in x86_64 and ppc64 support running 32 bit applications in 64-bit setups.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.