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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."
... 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"
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!
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.
"Because we can" the neckbearded Linux dweebs living in their mother's basement will tell you in between LARP sessions and shoving greased up Yoda dolls into their asses, while the adults are running rock-solid proprietary software on their server machines to do things which are actually important. Get the facts, people.
X11 was left behind by a number of different commercial Unix users for a reason. Apple being the most prominent i can think of, one of their engineers even left a rather long post on slashdot explaining why they went with their own system (hint: adding all the things they needed that X11 lacked and probably still does, would have required so much work it was easier to do something else).
And now Android has done something similar albeit for different reasons.
Personally X11 is the last thing i want to see on Linux devices going forward. I hate the thing and want to see it suffer if only for irrational reasons.
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 want to be just like you when I grow up
Ubuntu Mobile certainly has my ears perked up :)
And yet X11 is still so incredibly useful that vendors that want compatibility between their OS and another OS still use it. Thankfully there's a way to get X11 working in OSX.
CUPS? Why would you want to run the Common Unix Printing System on a phone?
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.
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
hard copy of all those sms messages
http://www.aaronrogier.net
So you can print things? Just taking a wild stab in the dark here ...
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!
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...
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.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about.
Just thought I'd let you know.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
X11 was left behind by a number of different commercial Unix users for a reason.
How many of them are still alive, though? other than OSX which has fed on OS9's marketshare rather than UNIX's, all of the rest seem to have bit the bullet a long time ago. Meanwhile, Linux, the *BSDs and Solaris seem to be going fairly strong despite being 'stuck' with X11.
Seems like UNIX admins are still too attached to being able to run their apps remotely, among other things.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
im not arguing, but X11 says nothing about decorations, borders, and doesn't even mandate a re-parenting window manager (although flash broke ICCCAP compliance by assuming that all X11 window managers are re-parenting)
not to say that it is necessary, but it is a very flexible system, and mandates little (if anything) in terms of appearance.
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!
Aargh. I wish. The moment I can run Ubuntu on a mobile phone and still make GSM (regular phone) calls on it is when I will buy a new device. For now I have a cell phone for GSM and a laptop for everything else.
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.
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.
So you can print things?
With CUPS? *shudder*
Someone needs his morning coffee ;)
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
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
Just thought I'd ask.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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
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.
And where do I get this "rock-solid proprietary software"? I've been in the business 20 years, not seen any yet.
I've never seen any "rock-solid software" of any kind, but at least the Open Source stuff I can fix by myself when needed.
"Just as open in the end."
What total bullsh*t.
Android is open from the kernel upwards, you can develop what you like for it without needing a developer account or a jailbreak. This is massively different from the iPhone, on which you can only make software if you have an account and the stack itself is totally closed.
This is why android can now be run on multiple devices, some ported by the community.
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 :(
CUPS works just fine on OS X. Funny, isn't it, how linux can take something that just works and fuck it up.
...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
Yeah. This makes the "instructions" rather dis-useful: they are simply "install X" (as X is already ported and we already know how to get Debian setup on the device), "run the X VNC server", "connect with an Android VNC client". The instructions should likely just have been placed in the article summary rather than forcing us to click through to AndroidFanatic to just get disappointed :(.
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.
They may get linux to run on it, but then it won't be able to communicate with any peripherals. WTF is the point???
I'm pretty sure that linux can run linux.
handles fork()
How many candles ?
Squirrel!
None of those systems have been doing well in the mainstream desktop space, which is what all the excitement over Android is about.
They're doing *far* better than the ones that tried to develop alternatives to X11, aren't they? and no, Android is about the mainstream *smartphone* space, it resembles the desktop space in some ways but in others it's much closer to the embedded one. What applies to Android and the rest of the smartphones does not necessarily apply to Windows, Linux and OSX, as it should be obvious.
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.
Agreed for the first part but X11 also brings some familiarity to the relatively large market of UNIX/Linux developers and getting more apps written for Android can only be a good thing. For the rest, all OSes will evolve differently. The problem of taking too long to adapt other products' innovations goes both ways, and in my opinion has more to do with copyright and patent laws than 'geeks' vs 'non-geeks', so it'd be a discussion best left for another day.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
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
They may get linux to run on it, but then it won't be able to communicate with any peripherals. WTF is the point???
well the article said
That seems to imply to me that you can connect to any X11 server you have credentials for and a network connection to and therefore any peripherals on that server or network.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Can I install my own OS? No - Android is only open in the sense that I can install my own applications developed for it. However, I cannot install my own OS or even leave the JVM sandbox."
Then you're talking about the handset, not the OS.
I have Android running on alternative (open) hardware and can do what the hell I like with it. There is no comparison here. Android is FOSS. The G1 may not be open hardware, but that's like saying linux isn't FOSS because your router manufacturer doesn't provide an easy way to flash a new image you've made...
Add to that you can only develop for the iPhone an a Mac. So Windows, Linux, etc users are SOL unless they buy Apple hardware. Nice business model. The main reason I wont buy Apple, lock in.
10 BEGIN
20 PRINT "SOLID AS A ROCK"
30 GOTON 20
40 END
I got all excited that there might actually be an answer too :-(
The most rock-solid software I've ever used is the free and open source kind.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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
Wow and I thought Windows Managers such as Gnome, KDE, LXDE and IceWM just managed windows and offered a common UI library for applications. If you are going to hook your cellphone up to a thinclient with a fulls screen and keyboard. For most real cases you are better of with a Desktop OS and you can do the same thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
""Because we can" the neckbearded Linux dweebs living in their mother's basement will tell you in between LARP sessions and shoving greased up Yoda dolls into their asses,"
OK, you sold me on the lifestyle. Is there a particularly suitable Yoda doll?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Uh, I don't really think any of the excitement about Android is about "the mainstream desktop" market, unless you are using a really odd definition of either "mainstream" or "desktop" in describing that market slice.
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
Android is open from the kernel upwards, you can develop what you like for it without needing a developer account or a jailbreak. This is massively different from the iPhone, on which you can only make software if you have an account and the stack itself is totally closed.
How can you possibly justify saying "you can only make software if you have an account" when you admit you know about jailbreaking? How is it in fact massivley different, when on one platform I can write whatever software I want and on the other I can write whatever software I want?
You can say "I can't release software on the Apple store" without a account, which would actually be true. But that is not the only way to release software, and is irrelevant to your own development.
You can't in fact even say "I can't distribute software to other people without an account" which is untrue, again others are making money selling jailbroken apps.
I guess I'm just different in that I focus on what you can do with a device in real life, as opposed to Apple Hater Fantasy Land where just because Apple does not condone jailbreaking means it does not exist.
Yes you can do more "with Google's permission" with Android but in the end that does not matter at all when YOU are the one writing the software.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
GOTON?!
GOTON!!??!!
Your Geek Card is revoked. Hand it over!
"I guess I'm just different in that I focus on what you can do with a device in real life, as opposed to Apple Hater Fantasy Land where just because Apple does not condone jailbreaking means it does not exist.
Yes you can do more "with Google's permission" with Android but in the end that does not matter at all when YOU are the one writing the software."
How can you even say these are remotely the same thing, when any given software update might brick your jailbroken phone?
And when Google have opened the actual operating system components so that not only can I write software, I can alter the systems and even build/run it for other systems. All legally.
It's not in any way the same thing.
Go back to apple-fellater-fantasy land where just because you can hack a device that's equivalent to a free, open and portable system.