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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?
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.
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.
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!
Why on earth would you install Vista.
There, fixed it for you.
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 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.
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.
...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
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
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."
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.
Am I the only one surprised by the fact that Linux could run on an Asus notebook? ;)
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.