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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."
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.
It may not look bad, but I run into situations repeatedly on my Aspire One where the dialog is simply too tall to be usable. Sometimes options, and frequently the Help/Ok/Cancel buttons are below the bottom edge of the screen (even if I set both of the gnome panels to autohide) and cannot be reached.
Frequently I run into default windows that are larger than 640x480, which while small was typical not long ago, and still common among mobile resolutions. GUI designers need to keep this in mind.
Ubuntu Mobile certainly has my ears perked up :)
Amuzing little screenshot from the last time I went to the "Get the Facts" Web site. http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s294/morghanphoenix/msreliability.png
X is not short for "X11 Window manager". If you do not know that X is not a window manager, you should probably be reading up on what X is instead of trying to makecomments about frame buffers, memory usage and other things you do not know about...
Yes you can. Check out the Android VNC Viewer.
Here is explanation of X & X11 ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
Here is an explanation of Window managers ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_window_manager
There are many kinds of window managers, with and without widgets, running on many different x-servers.. Although they may seem like one thing, they are not.. But your point on windowing and widgets I get, but that is not to say that some neat things can not be done with X windows at that size.. I mean if you wanted to you could make icons or buttons the size of your hand on your 19 inch (or whatever) monitor and fill the desktop with em, so if you scale down that to phone size, then it's not so crazy.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Many good things came out of the Athena project.
One of those things was X.
*puts on random statistic hat*
Another one of those things -which 90% of the corporate world uses every day- is Kerberos.
For the record, Android is not just about running stuff in Java: the developers at Google are actively working on the semantics behind having accessible JNI, some of the existing applications (including the OpenGL demo from Qualcomm people rave over) are mostly written in C, and we are likely going to have an entire Android "NDK" for doing native development to play with. Android is definitely the entire platform, including Linux.
If you search around on the android-platform mailing list you will find discussions of the various issues you are bringing up (such as multiple devices, architectures, etc.) and the various solutions (and non-solutions) people have for them.