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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."
Why don't you try the phone before assuming? N810 has its own problems because of how its handled.
The G1 tends to handle the sizing better than most phones in all honesty. If there's one thing the phone does noticeably well it's handle an enormous amount of icons while still having a keyboard (and not on screen keyboard) available.
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.
There was a slashdot article a month or so ago about how they got android to work on a small pc, but the GUI wasn't all there and they couldn't get it to work. So if they combine the desktop work with this gui combination, android will be a competitor in the netbook market.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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.
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.
Actually, I was far more excited to hear that X was ported than any given desktop because this is exactly where X shines.
I $ssh -x quite often from my eeepc in class. It's nice to be able to use my desktop computer's far superior processing power for things like compiling LaTeX documents (it's the format I take all my notes - lots of math stuff). Additionally it's nice to be able to take advantage of my computer's superior disk space for all sorts of things. The problem is, this is highly dependent on getting a wifi signal.
I ssh from my blackberry quite a bit as well. It'd be great if I could ssh some X stuff over it, for all the same reasons it works wonderfully on my eeepc - but when I don't have the eeepc or are lacking wifi. I can manage without it (my command-line-fu is not weak), but it'd be great if I did not have to do things like rip out the text from a PDF before reading it remotely, etc.
Hopefully I can keep from breaking my blackberry until a viable option for $ssh -x'ing from a new phone will be available.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
vnc, rdp and citrix logmein are surprisingly useful on my iphone. i can remote from 99% of the places i go pretty efficiently.
None of those systems have been doing well in the mainstream desktop space, which is what all the excitement over Android is about.
UNIX admins have little to do with the need for a good clean display system on portable devices and desktops. In fact the needs of geeks seem to guide the FOSS world far too much, thats why it was a big headline one or 2 Xorg releases ago that input and display devices would be hotpluggable years after everyone else solved that problem, it wasn't a dire need of the geeks in charge of the project nor anyone using it.
CUPS works just fine on OS X. Funny, isn't it, how linux can take something that just works and fuck it up.