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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
Ubuntu Mobile certainly has my ears perked up :)
So you can print things? Just taking a wild stab in the dark here ...
Those who do not understand X, are doomed to scream for its death while begging for someone to reimplement X poorly.
...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...
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
Yes you can. Check out the Android VNC Viewer.
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.
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.
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'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.