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Gnome, KDE, LXDE, IceWM All Working On Android
dooberrymctavish writes "Ghostwalker over at AndroidFanatic has gone and done it again; now he's released clear and concise instructions on how to get X11 server running on your Android device. Not only that, but he has successfully gotten LXDE, and IceWM running at a pace. There is even a photo with the instructions showing the LXDE desktop running right there on the device itself. Apparently, you can also VNC straight onto the phone's new desktop from your PC."
Seriously. Linux system runs X server, news at 11.
... wait never mind!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Its taken long enough. When will the get cups running? There have been enough non-phone installs to show this OS is building momentum. Even if at Google's glacial pace. The question now is who gets credit for the ath driver on Android.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
can you make phone calls with it?
Even the 800x480 of a Nokia N810 is a bit cramped for normal desktop style window managers. I hate to contemplate what it would be like to use anything like them on the 320x480 screen that is the G1. And I really don't think it's worth building up an Android netbook distro just to rip it back down to use desktop window managers-- if you want that, then run Linux on it already and forget about the Android application stack.
[
The Speed and resolution of a Portable Device, combined with the large size of a Desktop PC.
Yea you get geek cred points but for the most part it is kinda useless, for most real uses.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If your running Android on a desktop however for stuff like Smartphones KDE and Gnome are bascially useless. I would suggest porting across Enlightenment E17, especially if the rumors are true about an Android run eeePC
Make SELinux enforcing again!
So disappointed.
They may get linux to run on it, but then it won't be able to communicate with any peripherals. WTF is the point???
X could make a great UI on a phone, especially considering the current X server's new dpi awareness UI and font scaling. There's nothing that would prevent a mobile theme from being both usable and highly legible on a low-resolution device.
Ghostwriter didn't go and do anything again - he's just posting poor summaries of other people's work, with no credit for the original developers.
You'd think someone smart enough to create this hack would be able to use a camera to take a decent picture of it... but no.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Wow, your argument is so compelling.
Seriously, what's wrong with this troll? Is he drugged up or something and can't troll properly?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) and X2VNC (http://directory.fsf.org/project/x2vnc/) can be useful to 'merge' your phone and home PC screens. Move your mouse over to your android screen, copy something, paste it onto your PC application.
From Synergy website:
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).
Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.
While I agree with other commenters that existing desktop environments are an extremely bad fit for the Android and smart phones in general, what this development allows (and encourages me to think will happen soon) is a user-created free software platform built specifically for mobile phones. Phones need to have a lot of creativity applied to them; the iPhone was a big step forward in that department, but I'm inclined to think that the community of free software developers will be able to find myriad new uses for such devices - and implement them, to boot. Hopefully this can happen in a way that pays close attention to the much stricter design constraints of a handheld device.
Go back?
What makes you think the neckbeards ever stopped?
I want to be just like you when I grow up
Depending on the type of fork he uses, he might have 3 or 4 points.
Write new software that does look good on a cell phone screen.
With X11 up and running, that opens up a large bank of developers that know X and can do that, you know.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I was just happy to see IceWm in a slashdot headline. It's a great little WM that doesn't always get the attention from users it deserves.
No! X must not be ported! X must die!
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Anybody got Android running on the HTC Wizard yet? I'd love to dump Windows Mobile.
linux is like a hydra, if you fork it two will rise from the ashes...
...I could use it as a mobile phone!
Can you do X forwarding? Aka have your display on one machine and your client on another, or vice versa.
But can I vnc into my desktop from the phone?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Android is already a free software platform where users can write software without being locked out.
So is the iPhone.
If you have a developer account, you can deploy any software you like to your own phone (and a few others).
Or if you jailbreak a phone, you can deploy any software you want or have someone else send you whatever software they like.
Just as open in the end.
I do see value though it being able to re-write things with source code at the lowest level, but mostly for study and not so much for usability. It's hard to beat the guys who developed the low level device stuff for the iPhone or the G1 as they know the hardware inside and out in addition to the tradeoffs the hardware best lives with...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is pretty neat. I believe it would be better to have something lighter than KDE, GDM or even LXDE. Maybe dwm, scrotwm or xmonad... something like that. From a practicality standpoint it would be more suited to the comparitively weaker hardware of a mobile device. Not that this seems very practical in the first place!
Please jump in if I am misinterpreting, but I can't seem to see it any other way. Google offers a developer edition of the Android OS for a few extra dollars. It boasts a, "SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked device."
If this phone is only available to people who register with the Android Market, doesn't that mean that the regular consumer version is SIM-locked and hardware-locked?
If so, that would make it non-free software.
err, actually if you put a fork() in linux you get a pid, not a point, duh :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
One thing to keep in mind here, this is being viewed over a VNC session. Due to this you don't get 2D nor 3D acceleration... nor accelerated video or codecs.
I'd be much more interested in this if there was a way to replace the Android environment with a proper GNU/Linux environment including an accelerated X server.
(or I'd love to see the alternative, Android running in a window on X...) :)
Just thought I'd ask.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I have this old laptop that had difficulties coping with KDE, Gnome and Windows' memory demands. It was almost unusably slow.
I decided to try XFCE on it. Then I also installed xmonad and vimperator for better keyboard control.
It is blazing fast on this old laptop, faster than Gnome is on my very new desktops.
Its not as "pretty", but I think "immediate response" is so much more fun than "pretty" that I think I'm going to switch all my workstations to XFCE/xmonad rather than Gnome or KDE.
Seriously. Linux system runs 11 server, news at X.
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
I think we might want to distinguish two things:
1. Android as a platrofm is Linux kernel + Java framework for applications.
2. Android as operating system is just GNU/Linux.
When you write that X was ported to Android - I would expect it to run on top of Java libraries, be compiled to Dalvik bytecode and don't link directly to any underlying C libraries. This is the whole idea of Android, and the only way to provide multi-device support. Compile once-run anywhere.
I am not against porting stuff written in C to android, but it's problematic. It's much more problematic to distribute this software when we have multiple Android devices, running on different CPU architectures and other hardware.
It's really not a news that X, KDE, Gnome run on Linux.
linux fails it in every way. just put a fork in it.
Hmmm ... I think you meant to say "Windows" there. Linux handles fork() perfectly fine ...
Well done sir, you've just ruined Android. Now we can run all the bloatware that we have on our desktops on our phones, rather than developing the applications right (not using X11 and hundreds of dependencies) to start with. There's a reason Google decided not to use X11 and go with framebuffer apps instead.
Seemed to work on you...
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
err, actually if you put a fork() in linux you get a pid, not a point, duh :-p
fork() can return not only pids but also useful error information via (pid_t)(-1) while setting errno. This piece of information certainly makes a point ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
On a purely geek note, I'd love a VNC server for Symbian 60. As far as I've found, there is no FOSS server available, and my programming skills are not up to the job of porting :(
Useless?
You have no vision.
I know of dozens of uses for such a device.
Really, you don't know anything about network IPC.
Each of these can be used to control ANYTHING that has
TCP/IP.
...that they didn't use X in the first place. It's heavy. It'd also be a huge pain in the ass to get power management and wakeups under control
IMHO the biggest mistake with Android was the decision to invent their own (shitty) set of UI widgets. The interface designer is a joke. They should have ported the relevant bits of Qtopia.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
handles fork()
How many candles ?
Squirrel!
Alt-click is your friend, and doing so on any background area of the window will allow you to move the window around so you can get to the interesting parts.
Alt-click doesn't work properly if you have the desktop effects enabled though. I guess that the affects does boundary checking to prevent the top of the window from being dragged higher that the screen, which is something that it really shouldn't be doing.
Also, Gnome is working on a "tiny" window manager theme for screen space constrained devices. I haven't checked into it recently, but I imagine it's coming along (it should be in Fedora 11).
Cheers,
Ed
I think the best part of this isn't using a window manager on your phone. The best part is running applications on your phone from another machine or thin client. You carry your phone around and do your email and PIM type stuff. Then, you get home and ssh -X in from your machine and start your email/web/whatever application. Boom! its up on your local machine. No "sync". No muss. No fuss.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
You check the return value of fork()?! I've never had it happen, so I just exit if it fails, assuming that it means the system's in a state and the less stuff running on it probably the better *lol* but then I can be pretty slack when it comes to error handling! So I guess what I'm saying is that by the time it gets to making a point, I'm no longer interested, as it's blatantly not gonna be helpful :-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Yes, I was rather taken aback by this claim. That is until I read the article, which pointed out that they haven't actually tried KDE or GNOME yet.
I mean, KDE 4 barely works on my desktop let alone a handheld.
- Trogre, KDE 3 enthusiast, KDE 4 optimist.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Then you're talking about the handset, not the OS.
Now why should you chide him for that transition when I was talking about applications, not the OS?
You made the same mistake.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley