Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

An anonymous reader notes Ars Technica's report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, where Canonical has unveiled a prototype Android execution environment that will allow Android applications to run on Ubuntu and "potentially other conventional Linux distributions." "Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. Canonical is creating a specialized Android execution environment that could make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu desktops in Xorg alongside regular Linux applications. The execution environment would function like a simulator, providing the infrastructure that is needed to make the applications run. Some technical details about the Android execution environment were presented by Canonical developer Michael Casadevall... They successfully compiled it against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc and they are running it on a regular Ubuntu kernel."

Comments

This is where a subject should be

[russlar]

Makes sense, considering they're both Linux-based. Though, what does this mean for Ubuntu Netbook Remix? Of the MID edition I've seen elsewhere.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[master5o1]

It might mean that Canonical and Google could share an app store.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[russlar]

It might mean that Canonical and Google could share an app store.

gapt?

Re:This is where a subject should be

[Thinboy00]

It might mean that Canonical and Google could share an app store.

Canonical already has one (the huge Ubuntu repositories, especially -universe and -multiverse (-multi- is nonfree)) and Google can't use it b/c it's "Desktop ready" and not "android ready". So no, they won't share an app store.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[master5o1]

I didn't say that they would use only one between them. Ubuntu can still use its repositories while Android uses its own app store. The Android app store *could* potentially be shared with Ubuntu (or a separate one for both).

Re:This is where a subject should be

[Daengbo]

Since UDS is afire with talk about the "App Center" (which has been put on high priority for 9.10), I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Canonical wants to offer Android apps for sale through the App Center.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[Anonymous Coward]

how about "Googapt-get"?

Re:This is where a subject should be

[LWATCDR]

Really cool!
When did they add reviews? And where do I submit my app and how do set the price and collect the money?
If you can not do that then it isn't a app store. Store means you buy and sell stuff for money.
If not then it sure isn't an app store.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[sgt scrub]

Canoogle?

Re:This is where a subject should be

[Anonymous Coward]

how about "Googapt"?

FTFY, apt-get is part of apt, so Googapt-get would be part of Googapt.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[Thinboy00]

Well "app free-as-in-beer store" sounds funny.

Re:This is where a subject should be

[LWATCDR]

well since a store usually means someplace that you can buy or sell stuff it doesn't apply. Repositories are not an app store it is as simple as that.
I also think Linux needs and app store like the iTunes App store or Steam.

It would allow people to choose between buying an app or getting a free app. Reviews would help one choose which app is worth trying and which are not very good.
It would also improve the variety of software available for Linux Desktops. It could provide a way for FOSS projects to get funding. There is no reason why they couldn't put the App in the store for say $1 as well as leaving it in the repositories for free. Heck there is nothing in the GPL that would keep you from charging for the binary and only offering the source for free download. Sure somebody will probably compile it and make a package but they may still make good money from the people that choose to pay for the binary.
I see this as a win win. It will just take a distro to pony up and offer it.

If I had the choice

[QuantumG]

I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.

Re:If I had the choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Points for cleverness, but ultimately you're stupid, not funny. Get out.

Re:If I had the choice

[MichaelSmith]

I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.

Yeah we know how well that went.

Re:If I had the choice

[Flynsarmy]

Then you might be interested in this.

Re:If I had the choice

[QuantumG]

Maybe one day phones will become open platforms, but yeah, I'm not gunna hold my breath :)

Re:If I had the choice

[binarylarry]

Oh he's funny.

Just not "haw haw" funny.

Re:If I had the choice

[porl]

the problem with this was hardware issues and the fact that the software stack was dumped on the users in such a primitive state (the official line was that it would be worked on as things progressed). a lot of users bought these things expecting them to work out of the box and were disheartened so interest dropped off quickly. with a few hardware issues worked out and a more familiar front end (android or ubuntu) i think it would be an incredibly different story.

Re:If I had the choice

[cmdr_tofu]

you can put a debian chroot, on your android phone... is that good enough?

Re:If I had the choice

[MichaelSmith]

The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market. Investors want to see a solid return which a totally Free software stack can't provide.

Re:If I had the choice

[dns_server]

Still in business, still selling the current generation of hardware, still developing the operating system.
It would have been nice for them to continue developing the next generation but the current generation of hardware is still fine.

Re:If I had the choice

[siloko]

The mobile phone market moves so fast . . .

I agree. I looked at the OpenMoko about 18 monthes ago and the proposed pace of development was so glacial compared to proprietary offerings that the hardware platform (which was already looking dated) would be away with the dinosaurs by the time the software was fully functional and stable . . .

Re:If I had the choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but that company had no clue what they were doing. They contracted someone to do the UI in gtk, then they were convinced by some tard (guess who?) to rewrite the whole thing in Evas. Then when that didn't work out, rather than go back to the existing GTK-based code they had and finishing it up I think they started all over again using Qt.

I'm not trying to start a toolkit discussion.. this is just an illustration of how poor the decision making process was for OpenMoko.

*IF* Ubuntu ever wanted to go into the smartphone market, I think they'd have more success. Mark is a fucking smart guy and isn't going to throw money away the way OpenMoko did.

Re:If I had the choice

[faceleg]

lol registry, lol windows.

Re:If I had the choice

[cheftw]

and people say there's no justice anymore

Re:If I had the choice

[Hurricane78]

Says who?

Why would that change anything?

It's not as if those 99.9% of the phone buyers that never ever change their phone software, would suddenly hack it, just because it's open source.

Re:If I had the choice

[Hurricane78]

What has OpenMokos pace to do with that it was open source. Those things are unrelated.

If they would have been closed source, they would not have been faster. Rather even slower.

I think the OpenMoko people thought "hey, we just call it open source, and we can let the users do the all the work!"
Well. It does not work like that. You, as a company, still have to hire developers, just like the big companies.

Would they have worked just like Google or Apple, then speed would have been the same, no matter if it's open source.

But, and that is the point: It's only a question of money.

Re:If I had the choice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny you would think this seeing as Android is completely free and open source. You can download it anytime you want and put it on any piece of hardware you'd like and charge real money for it. Google and its investors are making a mint so, yes there is money to be made on a totally Free stack.

Re:If I had the choice

[Rich0]

While I don't care to run ubuntu on my phone (non-ideal UI for the task), what I would like to see is a C API for android.

My phone is SLOW!!! Memory is tight, and applications take forever to switch. The browser is fairly glacial (even when rendering pages that are stored locally in flash so it isn't just the mobile network).

I think that half the problem is Davlik. It is a non-JIT JVM-like implementation (though it isn't really Java).

While I like the app management that android provides, the requirement that everything be written in a completely-interpreted language definintely is slowing things down. Sure, it isn't a supercomputer, but that mobile CPU has more power than any desktop had more than 13 years ago or so. I suspect that if it could spend more of its time actually running instructions it would be a whole lot faster, and compiled code would use far less RAM and would have far fewer cache misses.

Sure, you could lose some platform-independence that way. I'm all for making the API smart - abstract the hardware as much as possible. You might still need different binaries for different CPUs, but you could minimize this to a great degree. If Google came out with some kind of davlik compiler (turns apks into mostly-native code) they could process the apps as they are installed (maybe centrally). That might be the best of both worlds.

It just seems like there is a lot of room to grow. Don't get me wrong - I realize they're just getting started and I'm pretty happy with my phone. It just isn't a finished product yet...

Re:If I had the choice

[eudaemon]

Funny,

but Android has a bunch of hacks meant to deal with running in a phone environment.
My apologies -- there is a video explaining it in more detail but youtube is blocked at work.

Re:If I had the choice

[FunkyELF]

lol registry, lol windows.

lol gconf, lol gnome

Re:If I had the choice

[Thinboy00]

What has OpenMokos pace to do with that it was open source. Those things are unrelated.

If they would have been closed source, they would not have been faster. Rather even slower.

Correct.

I think the OpenMoko people thought "hey, we just call it open source, and we can let the users do the all the work!"
Well. It does not work like that. You, as a company, still have to hire developers, just like the big companies.

That is possibly what they thought, and if so they were wrong.

Would they have worked just like Google or Apple, then speed would have been the same, no matter if it's open source.

Dead wrong. If they had had their own developers from the start, they might have attracted enough outside open source dev's for Linus's law to kick in. In which case open source would have been much faster. This really is a tragic story. One company decides to do something the right way, and then they assume that that will carry them with no work at all. End result: other companies and investors are unlikely to try that stunt any time soon.

Re:If I had the choice

[dfries]

I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.

Done, for Debian at least, Debian For Android Installer Released, so you can run all those programs that don't need GUI output. Wake me when they have X-windows as the native graphics system. Then I can run the same programs on the smart phone as the desktop, instead of rewriting them.

Re:If I had the choice

[freedom_india]

U think, its funny you twit?
It happened on the day i had an emergency.
The day i had to catch a train at 6 AM in the morning, and the cab driver hadn't showed up at 5.10AM, and i had to retrieve his number from my Desktop.
I boot up and i see this ugly blue screen.
Man i was so pissed off i could have shot at my PC if i had the time.
It was then i decided no more playing and supporting Linux...
After i returned back, i i tried bringing it up via ACronis secure zone, etc. Nope.
No Linux, No crap. Only Windows 7 64-bit
And i will be in the queue waiting to buy it when Microsoft releases it

Netbooks

[gmuslera]

If well are being tested to put Android directly in netbooks, having ubuntu netbook remix (or maybe even Moblin) along with Android applications could be the perfect match

trying not to be a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point? Most apps use GPS, tilt, and camera that most computers don't have(except for the camera). Those that don't use them are boring calculators and notepads. And even then, for the apps GUI to look right the window is restricted to a 320x480 rectangle or else you wind up with stretched buttons and text boxes.

Re:trying not to be a troll

[master5o1]

Easy porting between systems as one can right their program to scale to either system nicely.

important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Android has proved that people prefer linux over windows, OS X, Palm OS, etc. However, only when X/gnome/kde/SWING/etc are ditched. They're holding desktop linux back and it's time to move forward.

Re:important lesson

[oldspewey]

Forward to what? CLI?

Re:important lesson

[Darkness404]

Um, no it really hasn't. I'm a Linux supporter (currently typing this from an Ubuntu box) but the reasons why Linux is supported is that they aren't selling a full desktop. Android is popular for phones, people don't expect legacy apps to work with new phones, they don't have any mission critical software that needs to run (for most people), they get a new physical phone that looks different and so will take some time to learn it rather than dismiss it as broken the moment they can't find My Computer.

Windows Mobile is a broken OS, even the die hard MS fans know that out of the box its broken, sure, you can add software to make it usable, but a vanilla WinMo device is unusable. The iPhone is restricted to one device and one carrier, Android can run on many and is or soon will be on many different networks. Palm OS is severely outdated, but Web OS which is their replacement already has a strong following and the Pre is set to be the next thing in phones.

If Android was marketed as a full desktop or placed on "real" (ie: x86, full keyboard, decent screen) hardware it wouldn't sell because people won't learn a new OS on what they think is a Windows platform and it won't run some applications.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this proves anything. Android has a bit of buzz around it, but there are so few handsets commercially available using it that it's popularity is impossible to gauge. It's a bit like saying the iPhone proves that people prefer OS X, but only if you remove the dock.

Re:important lesson

[binarylarry]

There's millions and millions of them out there.

It might be a small number compared to the handheld market itself, but it's definitely a large enough sample for most metrics.

Re:important lesson

[sw155kn1f3]

Huh, dear troll, care to elaborate how WM is broken out of the box?
Had 2 WM smartphones in the past (WM2002, WM6) and nowhere near I find them broken, although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.

Re:important lesson

[Darkness404]

Well, for starters they don't have a very good web browser. Sure, its trivial to install Opera Mobile, but both the iPhone OS, and Android come with decent browsers. Then they don't have support for captive touchscreens (officially that is), then in my experience the UI is a mess (but thats just me), They don't have an app store and the one they do have lined up seems like it won't have very many apps (costs $100 for each app to be in the store per year). Then there is the general buggyness of it (hard resets everywhere, etc) in my experience battery life has suffered too (but having not ran a phone with 2 OSes on it I can't tell with certainty, but it sure seems less).

Re:important lesson

[morgan_greywolf]

Even Microsoft employees would rather have an iPhone than Windows Mobile.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have an app store

Great point! Instead there are many stores and places you can download whatever app you want and then install as you wish. Shame on Microsoft.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, Android proved "people prefer linux over windows, OS X, Palm OS, etc"? Uh, have android devices outsold ANY of those?

Re:important lesson

[narkis]

I am writing this in Jaunty, while my eclipse is awaiting a command to run the Android project on the connected Dev 1 (developer's google phone)... Curiously - I went through the whole Ubuntu thing away from Win XP because I felt it would help me become more comfortable with Android platform, and it did - now running these apps on Ubuntu would be - well - uncanny! I am interested in mundane useful stuff that becomes a reason to own a "platform" - be it a phone or a light netbook/touchpad - it would be pretty sweet to be able to expand the horizons!

Re:important lesson

[gig]

Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X. There are more gray market iPhones in China than there are Android devices in the whole world. And going to Ubuntu from OS X is like going back in time at least 10 years. There is no need to sugar coat it. The Linux community has spent the last 10 years sniffing Microsoft's tailpipe, reinventing the Start menu over and over again. The business community is drowning in Microsoft's turn-of-the-century bilge and the Linux community has yet to meet the opportunity with an office platform that does for Windows what OS X did for Mac OS.

Where are the goods? Don't be boastful when the goods have not been delivered.

Like some fuck-nut analyst said today that the Palm Pre has an operating system that is better than iPhone OS. Based on what? Talk is cheap.

Re:important lesson

[sw155kn1f3]

They do have a good web browser, it's called IE mobile and it worked long before opera mini (you don't even have the name correctly, keep trolling pal) became available, opera mini released in 2006. Before that all mobile browsers besides IE mobile sucked donkey balls. And yes, IE mobile is a good mobile web browser working out of the box.
Yes, this is just you. I personally find WM UI to be very easy to understand and use. I yet to see anything that surpasses WM address book and Outlook synchronization.
My first WM smartphone (Moto MPX200) didnt have any hard reset in 2 years before WM2003 became available for it - then I had to hard reset to upgrade firmaware. You're making things up again.
About appstore. Well. Handago existed for years, if you don't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Also WM is very open in terms of software installation, API and overall development. Noone forces you to use any appstore - install whatever you want.

Re:important lesson

[RanCossack]

and it worked long before opera mini (you don't even have the name correctly, keep trolling pal) became available, opera mini released in 2006. Before that all mobile browsers besides IE mobile sucked donkey balls.

I suspect *you* are just trolling but Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are two different products -- granted you can run both on Windows Mobile, although I believe you need the touchscreen edition to run Opera Mobile. (I would identify it by name, but they change the names of the touchscreen and non-touchscreen versions frequently; that's marketing and not a flaw of the OS, though.)

Also, you are incorrect -- at least for touchscreen devices. I recall Opera Mobile existing long before Opera Mini, although older versions were not nearly as nice as the latest and were pay. Further, there was NetFront and a free browser I can't remember the name of that pretty much was PIE with a better interface and tabs -- this was all back in 2003 or 2004.

PIE vs Opera/other... depends on the sites you use, by which I mean "I am being polite and PIE has never been good enough for me and constantly fails on sites not designed for mobile." Deepfish was rather nice, though, and I hear Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is going to be a welcome improvement.

(Don't say that I shouldn't expect my mobile browser to do full sites -- I recognize the difficulty and only need to look to Mozilla Fennec's predecessor Minimo to see how awfully slow it can be done, but Opera Mini *and* Mobile are very good at it.)

Finally, WM Address book and outlook sync might be nice, if you use windows... I wouldn't know. I find them distinctly "meh, it's alright" but wouldn't know what to compare them to. :) WM is *very* open in terms of PDAnet, so I stick with it.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

By that standard there isn't a single OS on the market, whether desktop or mobile, that isn't broken.

Re:important lesson

[AndGodSed]

how WM is broken out of the box?

although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.

There is a clue right there.

This is a view I find among Windows users a lot. (I support Windows for a living, servers and Desktops - XP, Vista and even the odd Win2k box and the other day I actually came across an office PC running Win98SE - eek)

The view is this - "Windows is not broken - it runs fine after installing all this, and doing that, and tweaking this, oh and don't forget the Firewall and Antivirus... look, no more crashes!"

The moment Linux comes up in the conversation (they usually ask after watching me troubleshoot the network from my laptop - Ubuntu, or whatever takes my fancy) they have this idea that it takes a lot of tinkering to get it to run properly.

From personal experience I have found a modern Linux distro takes about the same effort to get running to a users liking as would a typical Windows install. The effort is usually expended in different areas over the lifetime of the install as opposed to Windows - but it takes some effort both ways.

On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either. What seems a common theme with Windows installs are general slowing down over the life of the install, random Virus issues that needs to have an eye kept on it, MS updates that break stuff.

With Linux I find that the slowing down over time is not as obvious, if at all, and update related breakages are less common.

But Windows Users will happily spend hours to tinker with a Windows box, but the moment a Linux install needs some effort they throw their hands in the air and yell "This will never be ready!"

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the goods? Don't be boastful when the goods have not been delivered.

Yeah, you're so right. Look at OS X: a 20 year old UI on a 20 year old kernel written in a poor imitation of a 30 year old programming language. No package management. Lousy performance. Spinning beach ball of death.

Great theming and marketing, though.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X.

I do, fuck-nut.

Re:important lesson

[faceleg]

Yeah you're right, IE Mobile is EXCELLENT! I could easily configure it to work with my University's proxy, so I've been able use it instead of my laptop during boring lectures! \n /sarcasm. \n WM sucks, IE Mobile sucks, WMP Mobile sucks. The only software that comes with a vannila WM set up that doesn't suck is (drum roll) the calender and whatever that ball game is called. WM is broken and crap - no easy support for other languages, awful browser from 1990, worse media player, no dictionary, stupid, stupid, stupid file manager...

Re:important lesson

[faceleg]

Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X.

I do, fuck-nut.

This

Re:important lesson

[tepples]

Great point! Instead there are many stores and places you can download whatever app you want and then install as you wish.

Unless all mobile phone carriers that service the area where you live and work enable software restriction policies on the phones that they offer. Granted, it's more likely to happen in the United States than in mainland Europe, but the United States is two-thirds of the English-speaking market.

Re:important lesson

[faceleg]

'\n' Dur dur dur pressed submit instead of preview dur dur.

Re:important lesson

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

By that standard there isn't a single OS on the market, whether desktop or mobile, that isn't broken.

Which is why you choose the least broken one among the ones available to you.

Re:important lesson

[morgan_greywolf]

+1 Informative. I can't remember the exact amount of time between the first releases of Mobile and Mini, but it was at least 2 years. Mobile is a completely different browser than Mini. The easy way to think about it is that Opera Mobile is designed for phones with an OS and Mini is designed for phones that only run J2ME apps. Both gain their speed by using special web proxies run by Opera built for serving Web content to mobile phones and optimized specifically for their browsers.

Re:important lesson

[RiotingPacifist]

perhaps the desktop enviroments have been sniffing microsofts tail pipe well apart from
*Desktop effects (compiz 2006)
*True/fake transparency (kde3 2002, probably elsewhere before)
*Desktops/spaces (1989, 17 years before macs)
but if ignore all that then you can still look at all the markets linux is doing better than OS X
*servers, embedded systems, access-points, cars, phones(non-smart), media centers, supercomputing, Beowulf clusters
because its more stable, more secure, easier to maintain, lighter on resources, supports more hardware, more powerful and because it fucking can (id like to see a Beowulf cluster of OS X machines)
and thats ignoring the dazaling array of kernel features that osX is choking on the fumes of linux (and often windows) like: Linux security modules, kernel virtualisation manager, copy on write (coming soon), execute in place, mesh networking, root-key ( unable to run new root processes without a usb key in the drive), etc

Re:important lesson

[swb]

I couldn't agree more. I still run FreeBSD for CLI servers (Samba, Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc) but GUI support for UNIX takes the UNIX model of one-app-for-one-purpose past the breaking point. There's just too many components and too much 1970s configuration relative to Windows or MacOS.

Why can't the windowing manager and the display driver be merged together instead of seperate components? I guess many like it that way, but IMHO, it's just too much of a hack.

Re:important lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah and I throw a whole bunch of shit on a windows desktop I can make it look like shit too! Good job proving nothing.

Speed?

[Darkness404]

According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks. Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real one and native libs, etc? I know it might be hard to do and would have security problems, but it seems a lot faster that way.

Re:Speed?

[John Hasler]

> According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a
> real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks.

Sounds more like a shim than a simulator.

> Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real
> one and native libs, etc?

Not a kernel, no. It might be better to run in a chroot and use the Android libraries, though. Perhaps that is what they are doing.

Re:Speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason this JVM should run any slower than any other JVM has.

Re:Speed?

[Facegarden]

According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks. Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real one and native libs, etc? I know it might be hard to do and would have security problems, but it seems a lot faster that way.

I'm not sure if it is emulated or not, but even if it's slow to run an app, a desktop likely has a much faster processor than the phone the app was designed to run on, so it would probably be fine normally.
-Taylor

Re:Speed?

[Agent ME]

Android apps are Java, aren't they? Java is interpreted code, and won't run any slower on either platform. Actually, last I checked, Java is more mature on x86 processors supporting features like just-in-time compilation, so it could run faster on desktops.

This is assuming the android apps aren't compiled straight to some sort of ARM or other CPU-specific executable.

Re:Speed?

[PrescriptionWarning]

Its really just java, though a custom one. Java apps run in a virtual machine, but I don't think it technically can be considered an emulator. Java already isn't the speediest around, but its not too terrible either. I don't think a 1.x Ghz Atom will have a hard time running the same thing an android phone is made to run.

Re:Speed?

[12345Doug]

Considering the G1's processor is a Qualcomm® MSM7201Aâ, 528 MHz I'm pretty sure most desktops today (even those 5 years old) would be more than sufficient to power even a poorly emulated application.

Sup dawg

[Anonymous Coward]

Sup dawg, I herd you like run programs, so I put an operating system in your operating system so you can run programs while you run programs!

Re:Sup dawg

[theTerribleRobbo]

Hurd? Hurd doesn't run anything yet.

Re:Sup dawg

[Hurricane78]

Ow! That was so bad, it did Hurd!

Why?

[ianto]

Maybe I'm missing the point here but what exactly does being able to run Android apps aimed for the mobile phone have to do with a netbook or a desktop OS? Surely we can use Google Desktop for the stock apps and the others are well not entirely useful such as texting and calling without the right hardware/network?

Re:Why?

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe so you can develop android applications on ubuntu.

Re:Why?

[ChunderDownunder]

Um, you already can.

Re:Why?

[MichaelSmith]

Okay, interesting. That one seems to be a binary release only so I assume it is in the category of non-free and non-portable.

Re:Why?

[ChunderDownunder]

I haven't downloaded this mind you but I just spotted a blog on downloading the android source. Hope this helps...

Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[omar.sahal]

I would rather Ubuntu spent money and time on fixing known issues (in addition to future projects such as this) Hibernate and Suspend did not work through out various editions. I still think Suspend may still not work in Jaunty
I even heard mint Linux have graphics cards such as nvidia working on their platform but Ubuntu has not.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[master5o1]

Troll much? Suspend and Hibernate work fine on my system, my Nvidia card seems to be fine too. You may have just come from 2005 but right here in 2009 we have a much better Ubuntu that before.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[RiotingPacifist]

hibernate works (well its a horribly designed hack on all linux but it works)
suspend varies by computer, but for most it works (occasionally the screen will not resume on some chipsets, but that is being worked on)
mint is ubuntu but with a couple of extra repos and prop drivers by default.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[QuantumG]

You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[omar.sahal]

mint is ubuntu but with a couple of extra repos and prop drivers by default.

Which makes it all the more frustrating. It may not be pretty and it wont please RMS but it will benefit people.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[macshit]

You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.

... and of course in Ubuntu's case, a huge proportion of the packaging/infrastructure work actually comes from Debian!

They are good at polishing things up though.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[tpgp]

You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya?

So why aren't all the other distros the same as Ubuntu?

Polish? Integration? Patches sent to upstream? Notification system? All these things count as 'work' in my book.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[QuantumG]

Yes, absolutely, they do.. except for the whole patches upstream part.. last I heard, that doesn't actually happen. Bug reports upstream, sure.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[tpgp]

Yes, absolutely, they do.. except for the whole patches upstream part.. last I heard, that doesn't actually happen. Bug reports upstream, sure.

Oh, you heard did you? Want to provide us with a link to back up your assertion?

Here's a choice quote from my link:

GregKH: "Canonical only contributed 6 patches in 5 years"
 
  BenC: First off, Canonical hasn't even been around for 5 years, so expressing the numbers in this way leads to some incorrect conclusions. Second off, using a check for ^Author with a canonical.com or ubuntu.com email address in the v2.6.25 tag of the upstream kernel tree, shows 91 commits (I should know the numbers, since 63 of those were from me). Granted, Redhat and SuSe outnumber us considerably, but then we don't have > 100 kernel developers on staff (we have less than 10).

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

suspend and hibernate also work for me. it would not make sense for them to release features that do not work. perhaps they don't work for you, perhaps they don't work because of you.

nvidia is also supported and has been for some time.

back on topic though, this is great to hear. it could be argued that time/effort should be spent on other technologies, but at the same time, it has to be remembered that this is open source. no monetary rewards.

all open source devs should be congratulated for any work they do.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[master5o1]

How can anything please Stallman when he can't accept a simple omission of four characters?

(GNU/Linux)

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[porl]

...because mr ubuntu can only ever work on one thing at a time...

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

"Troll much? Suspend and Hibernate work fine on my system, my Nvidia card seems to be fine too. You may have just come from 2005 but right here in 2009 we have a much better Ubuntu that before."

You don't know what you are talking about. Both bonk on my system; it won't come out of them. I use the LTS releases exclusively.

Now, I don't particularly care about hibernating or suspending anyways, but don't act as if Ubuntu is even functional or stable for everyone. It's not. I like Ubuntu, I wish all those working and using it well (even you), but they have a damn big problem of doing some stupid ass major change before they've hammered down the problems of the then current release. This is what MS does.

You can ignore user complaints all you want, but when you go beyond and badmouth people as trolling because your limited anecdotal experience is so poor, I might as well stay with my MS boxes or go back to Apple and the near similar fanboy advocacy.

There are a slew of stuff in the current LTS which, frankly, sucks, but Ubuntu just doesn't have it together. It isn't that the Ubuntu people aren't trying. It's just that they've reached past the point of solving it all versus upgrading to the next version. To that end, they have an OS that is neither here or there. It has it's place, but I don't see it as all that special compared to other distros.

For me, aside from the improvements in Firefox and Evolution, 6.04 or so was the most stable system on the hardware I have.

The person who configured chess in 8 from the setup in 7 should be flogged with steel tipped whip. I mean, damn man, if you configure the chess program, at least use the program. Or see how it's compiled elsewhere or earlier versions for how things should be. GNU chess on my XP box works better than this crap.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[ryszard99]

suspend and hibernate also work well for me on my lappy.

while the nvidia driver does work, i have screen refresh problems in a CLI with compiz. I turn compiz off and no more problem!

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Daengbo]

OK, then, how about the "Brasero didn't work and Nautilus crashed when you put in a CDR because libbrasero replaced Nautilus CD burner" bug that came with Jaunty? Or the "Sound stops working randomly when using Flash in a browser" bug that came with Intrepid? Or how about the "F-Spot (the default photo manager) doesn't even run on AMD64" bug that came with Hardy?

Face it, Ubuntu is a "wait for SP1" distro. Release early and release often evolved to be release on time and fix it later, damn it!

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Max Littlemore]

You may have just come from 2005 but right here in 2009 we have a much better Ubuntu that before.

I haven't actually upgraded to 9.04 (haven't been using the notebook) but suspend is definitely broken for me in 8.10 - it never wakes up. I get a BSoaVS (black screen of a vegitative state). So it could be he came from March 2009 with that comment, not 2005. Hardly trolling, unless you were referring to your own post.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Professional Slacker]

Really? Awesome! Where can I get this "much better Ubuntu" I've been running Jaunty since alpha 3, so that can't be the version you're talking about. If you could kindly point me to a working fix for this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/59867
I would be a very happy man.

Hell I'm generally a linux fanboi, but really to say that suspend is working takes quite a leap of faith. The OP wasn't trolling this stuff really is broken, I'm glad your system works count yourself lucky. Frankly every laptop I've ever seen has an i8042 controller in it, and every bug report I've ever seen related to the i8042's suspend issue has been closed as "won't fix", so not only is it broken but the devs appear to be playing ostrich on this one.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[speedtux]

Suspend and hibernate work for men. nVidia and ATI cards work on all my laptops and desktops.

I think Ubuntu currently has some of the best hardware support around. They're doing as well as one can, given that they have little support from manufacturers. I don't think more effort in this area would even make much of a difference.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[howlingmadhowie]

yeah, one wonders why.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[tepples]

suspend varies by computer, but for most it works (occasionally the screen will not resume on some chipsets, but that is being worked on)

I don't count it as "working" if I can't get the sound volume to go past 0 without a restart. Ubuntu Hardy on Eee PC 900.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[RiotingPacifist]

Its very easy to include stuff by default if you don't have to support it!

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[mspohr]

Suspend and hibernate work just fine on all the laptops where I have installed it... (all Dell) with both 8.04 and 8.10.

My anecdotal experience trumps your anecdotal experience.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Selfbain]

I have 9.04 on my EeePC and suspend works fine BUT I also have 8.10 running on my desktop and I had to disable suspend completely because my keyboard has a 'sleep' button on it which I should relabel 'crash the computer'.

Re:Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same issue on my Acer laptop using the Centrino chipset with 8.04 not wanting to come out of suspend/hibernate. I imagine it had something to do with the 2.6.24 kernel not supporting the feature properly. Since moving to Debian Lenny, with the 2.6.26 kernel, it all works great. I'm not sure why you are staying with Ubuntu, and I'm not saying that Ubuntu is particularly crash prone, but, if rock-solid stability is what you are going for, maybe give Debian a try. Obviously, since Ubuntu is based on it, it will be a very similar experience just with a few less training wheels attached. And, the Debian devs are loathe to introduce changes that break anything so, it actually end up a much better experience for you.

And Google doesn't get Sued?

[Zehuti]

"Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments." Is this not exactly what Sun sued Microsoft for? It's ok for Google, but M$ gets sued?

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[nametaken]

I think that was over MS putting a non-compatible VM in the OS and calling it Java.

I get the impression that this has more to do with having the libs stripped and replaced.

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't marketing the Android environment as Java. That's the key difference.

Microsoft had their own implementation of Java (the VM and the language), which wasn't entirely compatible with Sun's, had additional features that were only present in Microsoft's implementation, and lots of Windows-only libraries. It implemented only a subset of Sun's Java specification, and didn't pass the test suites. They still called it Java, and encouraged developers to use their implementation instead of Sun's. Their development environment and documentation led you straight to using Microsoft's implementations of everything, rather than Sun's, and their made it very hard for developers to tell if their application could run on Sun's VM as well. So in effect, they created their own distinct version of Java, with applications written for one implementation being incompatible with the other, but still called it Java, and still tried to benefit from Sun's Java marketing (including the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise). Basically, they tried to usurp the platform, while still using Sun's trademarked Java name to market it. Sun really had no choice but to sue.

Microsoft's Java implementation lived on after that, under the name "J++", and later as "Visual J#". They no longer position it as "Java", but as a Java-language compiler for .NET.

Google, on the other hand, don't mention Java anywhere. You're not writing Java applications - you're writing Android applications. Those applications happen to be written using the Java programming language, and execute inside a Java VM, but that's just an implementation detail. Their main website doesn't mention Java. The first few pages of their developer site don't mention Java, until you get to the page detailing the requirements for running the SDK. They make no attempt to claim that their implementation is Java, or even compatible. They make it clear that Java applications don't work on Android, and Android applications don't work on standard Java.

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[xlotlu]

Java wasn't opensourced back then. There's a not-so-subtle difference here:

I take your specs for a platform, implement them, and extend them with some proprietary APIs that I make sure are valuable for developers but won't run on your platform.
This is meant to kill your product's unique advantage: its ability to run everywhere, which I consider a threat to the monopoly of another product I develop: an operating system.
Next, I make my platform the standard on said operating system by bundling and leveraging my monopoly.
In the mean time I make sure that products written for your standard platform will break in funny ways when running on mine, so developers will shy away from the technology altogether.

vs.

I take some of your specs, look at your code, and come up with a different product. I never pretend interoperability between our platforms.
Then I publish the code under a liberal license, which even allows you to incorporate all my work into your product.

If they are so inclined, Sun, err.. Oracle can take whatever extras Google implemented in Android and make it part of their JVM. It's perfectly legal, and they don't have to pay squat for it.

Comparing this to Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish attempt is either trolling, or a severe lack of knowledge of recent history / understanding of licensing / what Android is all about. For the sake of innocence until proven guilty I presume you're not a troll.. but then.. what are you doing on slashdot?

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[ChunderDownunder]

Android allows developers to write applications using the Java language but doesn't claim to be compatible with either the Java SE or ME platforms. Nor does it license any code from Sun or OpenJDK.

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[markov23]

The goals of the companies are the same -- google wants apps that only work on their platform to create some lock in -- thats not the worst thing in the world for a business to attempt -- but thats clearly all it is. You can say there is some subtle marketing difference, but they are doing the same thing. I was working in ms java back then -- ms gave java a decent window painter ( something java still doesnt have ) and sun had a fit. The fit was more about sun feeling ms was a competitor than stewardship over java. At some point the mood of these forums will change towards google when enough people realize they have gotten as big and monopolistic as ms and they are starting to play from the same playbook. The easy test is to ask yourself if this story was for the new application environment on the pocket pc -- would we have 200 ranting msft posts.

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[gbjbaanb]

It turns out Sun had a fit about MS Java because MS really was trying to destroy it.

See the groklaw link for the summary. Poor Bill Gates said he was kept awake at night worrying about this competitor!

I see the attitude towards Google already starting to change, compared to how they were received as perfect in every way when they started out. As long as they don't act like MS has done in the pages of lawsuit after lawsuit, then I don't care so much if they do become more monopolistic. they'll be just another big company.

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about?

Nothing you've said in your post has happened, and you're talking like it not only has happened but no one realizes it but you...

Perhaps that detail should indicate something *shrug*

Re:And Google doesn't get Sued?

[babblefrog]

My understanding is that Google didn't do it this way just to be different, but rather it was the licensing terms for Java ME that caused the problem. Evidently ME is licensed differently from SE or EE, and Google couldn't use it. Discussed here: http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Developer tools

[ChunderDownunder]

If Canonical do see Android as a beneficial software stack, perhaps they'll focus a bit more energy on the Java-related developer tools too.

Specifically Eclipse. Android's developer plugin requires Eclipse 3.3 or higher, whereas Ubuntu comes with 3.2. I don't know the technical details of why packaging eclipse in .deb archives should be so difficult (Fedora manage to do it for rpm)but this bug entry has been open for almost 2 years! :-( Shuttleworth commented on it 15 months ago, yet still no progress.

Sure, one can download it manually but it kinda defeats the purpose of having a package manager for such scenarios.

Re:Developer tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally just grab Eclipse from the website to grab the version I want and just set up the java environment I want rather than installing Eclipse and having that god awful ecj infest my system. It takes longer to download than to set up, which consists of unpacking a zip file, much like using it on windows.

Re: yo yo dawg

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, yo dawg, I herd yo and yo dawg like yo-yos, so I put a pic of yo dawg yo-yoin in a yo-yo, so yo can yo-yo yo dawg while yo dawg yo-yos, dawg.

An I herd yo like pr0n, so I put a browsa in yo browsa so yo can still rise in yo trowsa while yo other browsa crashe@#$*(@#$NO CARRIER

Re:Developer tools - eclipse died in Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary problem is that eclipse is not being actively maintained upstream in Debian. It is in some ways rather hard to package which has to be actively maintained much like firefox, and nobody has stepped up to take it over. If nothing changes, I would not be surprised to see eclipse eventually dropped in Debian and by extension in Ubuntu.

Future products...

[ChunderDownunder]

(1) some wacky adventurers may want to wipe Android and run raw ubuntu on the handset - so it will have the same hardware.

(2) support for hardware features may be added in future netbooks. GPS might be emulated via 3G network triangulation, tilt may be added to forthcoming netbook tablets*. And as for the dimensions, run apps in windowed rather than full screen mode...

* Only a matter of time before Asus, Acer & others smash the lucrative tablet PC market.

Re:Future products...

[Sir_Lewk]

Some laptops already have tilt, albiet in a hackish fashion. I can tilt my thinkpad around, using the accelerameter in the harddrive as a joystick.

Will change, eventually

[Mathinker]

> The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market

Eventually, this will change, when phone functionality starts to saturate and no one actually needs shiny new features. But that time, I think, is quite far in the future.

Re:Will change, eventually

[trickyD1ck]

Yes, it is a moving target.

good

[jipn4]

I think this is a really great effort.

I hope Android can meet them half way by making Android itself more compliant with Linux standards. Android is nice what it is, but it remains a very specialized platform. Interoperating better might be good for its acceptance as well.

isn't that the point of java?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought java traded speed and memory for portability. Now it doesn't really have that either?

What a pack of blow hards

[jvillain]

Why is it that ever single little thing that Canonical does has to become a slashdot story or a press release? We now have this story soon to be followed up by the we have a team story, to be followed up by the we might write some code soon story, to be followed up by the we have an alpha story followed by....

Ubuntu has become the only Linux distro I absolute despise because they never take a break from running their mouths. Mark Shuttleworth is the new Daryl McBride.Get back to us when you have some actual news.

matters to me

[speedtux]

I'm sorry it doesn't matter to you what Ubuntu does, but it does matter to me and probably many other geek-Ubuntu-users. That's probably why it keeps appearing on Slashdot.

And whether and how Ubuntu's app store works is big news; if they unify Android and Ubuntu's application stores, that really gives them a big leg up in the market. That matters to everybody.

Re:matters to me

[Caesar Tjalbo]

geek-Ubuntu-users

You're still on Windows, aren't ya?

Re:Developer tools - eclipse died in Debian

[ChunderDownunder]

Well I guess if Canonical sees value, as I suggested, in providing developer assistance for this new Ubuntu-Android partnership they would be an ideal candidate to take upstream ownership, given no-one else has.

Re:Developer tools - eclipse died in Debian

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Anyway, Eclipse is one of those self-updating apps with its own package manager/provisioning platform (p2). It's not really designed to be installed as a shared program, unfortunately so. As a Debian user and Eclipse developer, I don't find it such a big deal to simply decompress the Eclipse archive in the home directly.

I agree...

[A12m0v]

X is a disaster!

All the variouse WMs and DEs (I use Fluxbox personally) barely cover up the rough edges and sharp corners in the X brainfuck!

For your reading pleasure:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010180516/http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10127
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/X_Window_System

I dont get it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this significant? Why would you want to run crappy mobile phone apps on a much more powerful netbook/laptop, which probably has better related apps available?

Re:I dont get it..

[Lord Bitman]

it sure as hell could ease development, at least for casual users. Developing in the same environment you run in, followed by porting it to whatever you /really/ want to run it on, has always been my preferred method*

*when the environments are closely compatible, which this seems will be the case.

Linux drivers don't come on CDs

[tepples]

On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either.

And under Linux, you just have to pitch some hardware because there is no driver and no hope of getting the manufacturer's help in making a driver. For example, the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner has gone unsupported in SANE for years. Windows, on the other hand, almost guarantees that you can use a driver from the enclosed CD.

Re:Linux drivers don't come on CDs

[AndGodSed]

Okay, so one scanner does not work, an old scanner. Show me hardware from pre XP days and I can find examples in that group that do not work under XP.

Also you conveniently forget the driver nightmare that was (and still is!) windows Vista.

Lexmark is an example of bad hardware support by a vendor for Linux.

Now the obvious question: How is this linux's fault?

But that is the attitude out there isn't it? My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.

And I have had to download drivers for Windows machines when the enclosed CD provided drivers do not work. Examples are (just from this year): A sharp network printer/copier. HP Printers, especially older ones when a client needs to re-install. Motherboard drivers when a service pack upgrade neccesitated new drivers.

ANd the need to download and install a service pack when a piece of hardware was added post SP upgrade and the PC needed a format/reinstall due to Windows going bork for whatever reason - here's looking at you Linksys PCI-WIFI card.

So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available ("broadband here is classified as anything faster than 128kb/s and normally ranges in 1gb caps [limits] and up - uncapped broadband is speed limited to 1Mb/s) and the only drivers I regularly need to download are Nvidia binary drivers, and my brothers Geforce 6x series card has a linux driver on the CD! (this was his old card, he now has a newer one - 8800 something and I run a 6500 but only because I am no gamer - enjoy scripting and so on more than fragging.)

Seriously - be fair when criticizing. Like my OP said - BOTH operating systems require some tinkering to get to work on SOME hardware.

And I have personally seen more hardware renegated to the trash bin in our company due to Vista than to any of the guys running Linux - most recently my boss needing to buy a new business card scanner because his previous one (only about 18months old) is not Vista supported, he needed to get a newer HP printer, and the rest of the office still (thankfully) run XP and Linux because upgrading the Windows users to Vista would mean us replacing severral not so old HP printers - like the 1080 that our accounts lady is using.

Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver, but in the real world the scenario is often quite different.

Mac OS to OS X: "inventing" '70s features?

[jonaskoelker]

the Linux community has yet to meet the opportunity with an office platform that does for Windows what OS X did for Mac OS.

Didn't NT (2000, XP) implement memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking? Didn't Unix do those in the '70s? Didn't Linux do those from day 1?

Or do you mean the symmetric multiprocessing that was added in OS X? I hear that Linux already does that.

I haven't owned a Mac, and I have only used them in the early '90s, so maybe I'm not the most qualified person to talk here*.

But... what are the major features that OS X has, that neither of OS 9, Linux nor Windows has?

* I'm not an Apple hater or an MS hater or a Linux fanboi (any longer :D). All three OSes have issues. The Linux crap is just easier and more pleasant for me to fix or work around.

Fault != problem

[tepples]

Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?

It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.

My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.

It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.

So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available

So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?

Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver

But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.

Re:Fault != problem

[AndGodSed]

Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?

It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.

I agree. But the problem is not as large as you seem to make it out to be. Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?

My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.

It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.

I struggle to understand exactly what you are getting at here. Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"

While it is wrong for people to place the blame elsewhere (i.e. at Linux's door) it is a symptom of the way Operating Systems are perceived. Windows = Right, Linux = Not Right.

So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available

So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?

I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.

For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card) I have needed to get the broadcom driver from the repo, and once I got alerted that my internal wintel modem had a proprietary driver available.

For my USB LG WIFI card I could install with NdisWrapper the driver that is available on the CD, though the NdisWrapper was not always available in a clean install. With Ubuntu I needed to downloaded NdisWrapper, with Mint and Mandrive I had a NdisWrapper driver available.

Using my phone as a GPRS modem (Nokia) I came right with KDE based environments without Internet Access because KPPP supported it without the need to download anything.

Lately with UBUNTU 3g cards work out of the box, no drivers needed.

Previously I did one of two things - took my laptop to an internet cafe to download and install everything I needed driver wise via LAN (this was usually limited to a broadcom WIFI driver, and once to KPPP for Ubuntu) or I got the repo's on DVD from a local LUG for free and installed everything I needed from there.

Shipit, from Canonical, also provides the base install for free via e-mail. It is a pain though that Ubuntu does not have mainstream codec support by default though.

Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver

But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.

"Vast Majority Of Hardware" is a very strong statement. You will have to support it because I can count the unsupported hardware that I needed (or need) to download hardware for on one had.

1. Broadcom Wifi Card.
2. Wacom Tablet (now supported out of the box with Karmic Koala)
3. Nvidia Proprietary drivers.
4. My Microdia Webcam - works fine BTW.
5. Internal Intel software modem.

Honorable mention: Ndiswrapper (not technically a driver - but I'll add it here in any case since it enables the using of the hardware driver) (also not true with all distributions)

And hardware that completely fails to work with Linux.

Lexmark Printers - Some have claimed to have gotten these to work properly.
My one friend has a music centre (amplifier, auto drum set, sound board) that he had to fiddle around with to work - no official support. He is a musician and us

Re:Fault != problem

[tepples]

Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?

I agree, less of a problem. But there is a threshold where a user can walk into Best Buy and expect to walk out with a known-working printer without having to use a different printer to print up the HCL.

Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"

It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.

I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.

Back in the Red Hat Linux 6 days (that's 2000, not RHEL 6 which isn't out yet), I had to download and install a kernel module to let me use the Lucent winmodem in my Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop. This is probably because winmodem drivers are non-free, which in turn is because v.90 is patented. And how does "never" meet your "Internal Intel software modem"?

For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card)

I wasn't making such a distinction. Forward-thinking restaurants and hotels used to provide Ethernet jacks for each patron. Now they have switched from 100BASE-TX to Wi-Fi, just a change in layer 1 without a corresponding change in the layer 2-3 network policy above it.

On reading your final comment I realise you might have meant "No enclosed drivers on the CD" as opposed to "No Drivers Available At All"

Correct.

but my counterpoint is that the large majority of hardware out there works out of the box with Linux, and hence needs no drivers.

It depends on which releases of your distribution you follow. A hobbyist has the time to follow Ubuntu from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty, but if you're trying for a stable environment, for example at work, you're probably going from one long-term-supported release to the next, so the hardware support of Hardy out of the box remains relevant for about another year. And often, the official driver enables features that the developers of the free driver don't know how to turn on, such as OpenGL acceleration on some video cards.

Re:Fault != problem

[LWATCDR]

One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.
Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.
You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.
Ah but you say that you can just release the specs and driver will show up. Well maybe but most complex FOSS drivers are written by the companies that produce the hardware and not by the community. They often help but the majority of the work is done by the vendor.
Next you have support issues. How do you know if the device is failing and not the driver?
Then you have timing issues. You have a supper cool new graphics card and you want Linux users to have chance to use it. Well the new driver has made it into the the distros kernels yet.... So what do you do?
And are the problems if you can FOSS the driver.
If your driver uses software that you can not release because you bought it then can not do a FOSS driver. You may have to spend a lot of money to write around the code and test it. Then you are right back to the same problems.

The reasons for a lack of a stable driver interface are IMHO contrived at best. Yes you may loose a tiny bit of speed. Security? Not if you design the interface well. Locked into Cruft? Yes that is an issue but nobody says you must keep the interface forever. Just keep it for .x revisons like 2.6 and if you need to change it change it for 2.7 or 2.8
The real reason is the desire to keep closed source drivers out of the Kernel. Which I can understand but has failed. NDIS wrapper and the nVidia and ATI binary drivers are proof of that.

ATI has been releasing the specs of their chips for a while now. Still no driver that is fully usable for the latest and greatest. You can not just release the specs and have the drivers show up. It takes a lot of work and effort.

Re:Fault != problem

[morgan_greywolf]

Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?

It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.

It's not really a problem, either. That an old scanner doesn't have driver support in SANE matters not. Or that a particular printer manufacturer's printers don't work well on Linux isn't a problem either.

I'll say it again: You have to buy hardware that works right in Linux, just as you have to buy hardware that works right in Mac OS X, just like you have to buy hardware that works in Windows Vista or even XP. I can tell you from personal experience that there is a TON of old hardware that absolutely, positively does NOT work with Windows XP, nor will it ever. And there is a TON MORE of old hardware that does NOT work with Vista.

So the ScanMaker 4850 doesn't work. It's a crappy Microtek piece of junk anyway. Just go out and get one of the other scanners that do work. Most (all?) of the Canon LIDE scanners are fully supported under SANE. I have a LiDE 60. It works great. I didn't even need to install anything. I just plugged it into the USB port and it was automatically recognized in Xsane. And, oh yeah, since SANE supports network transparency, the scanner is shared out on my network so I can scan using any of my laptops or mine or my wife's desktop, etc. scross the network, in a completely transparent fashion. Try that in Windows.

It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.

A penguin logo, while it would be nice, is not needed. Since you already need to research hardware before you buy it, you'll know what models works and don't work before you even get to the store. BTW--I would recommend that Windows users do the same, because just because it is supported on Windows doesn't mean it is supported for your version of Windows or your particular hardware configuration.

So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?

You don't need to. Most plug-and-play wired network cards are already supported by most Linux kernels out of the box. Between support for Broadcom, Intel, 3COM, and Realtek chipsets, that covers virtually 100% of all NICs you could buy in the store.

As for wireless, current Ubuntu versions actually ship (closed binary blob) support for the Broadcom wireless NICs found in most laptops these days on the LiveCD. Many other chipsets are also supported.

But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.

For many, many pieces of hardware, no driver CD is necessary. Simply plug the device in and hal/dbus will automatically load the correct driver. Done.

Re:Fault != problem

[AndGodSed]

Fair enough - you raise some good points, I will address them below.

One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.

Why? If a binary blob can be downloaded and installed then it can be put on a cd.

Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.

A cd can hold 700mb of data. Even if a driver is 100mb a CD can hold the .deb, .rpm, source.tgz, Windows XP .exe, Windows Vista .exe and maybe even a Win2k/Mac installer and still have 100mb left for the autorun, pdf reader and other goodies (bloatware) for Windows.

You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.

Well what you are referring to is dependency hell. If you are not a Red-Hat fan you will call it RPM hell. Yes that will pose a problem, but most drivers are rather small, and a lot of the dependencies are included in the binary blob.

Ah but you say that you can just release the specs and driver will show up.

Uh. I never said that, and it is not completely true - but if you release the specs chances are that if not the community, then some larger vendor will write the drivers.

Well maybe but most complex FOSS drivers are written by the companies that produce the hardware and not by the community. They often help but the majority of the work is done by the vendor.

While that is true, the community sometimes provides better drivers than the vendor - a good example is the vendor supplied fgrlx drivers for ATI cards as opposed to the open-source alternative.

Next you have support issues. How do you know if the device is failing and not the driver?

The same is true for Windows. I am in support, and let me tell you, one of the things you do is download the newest driver from the vendor's website. Why is it OK do do this for Windows and not for Linux?

Then you have timing issues. You have a supper cool new graphics card and you want Linux users to have chance to use it. Well the new driver has made it into the the distros kernels yet.... So what do you do?

You provide the drivers! How does a vendor release a brand-new graphics card without a driver in the first place? Nvidia supplies the drivers on their disk so this is a non-point as far as I am concerned.

And are the problems if you can FOSS the driver.
If your driver uses software that you can not release because you bought it then can not do a FOSS driver.

Look, I am not a fan of those who insist that any driver that is used in concert with FOSS software needs to be open-sourced. If NVIDIA wants to keep their driver proprietary it is OK with me as long as the darned thing works. Why insist on FOSS if it works? I know that there are philosophical and practical reasons for open-sourcing software and drivers, but there has to be some give with the take.

You may have to spend a lot of money to write around the code and test it. Then you are right back to the same problems.

Well I pay good money for the hardware, I expect the vendor to provide me with the tools to use it. I am convinced that they make enough money off off the hardware to justify some extra effort with the software.

The reasons for a lack of a stable driver interface are IMHO contrived at best. Yes you may loose a tiny bit of speed. Security? Not if you design the interface well. Locked into Cruft? Yes that is an issue but nobody says you must keep the interface f

Re:Fault != problem

[AndGodSed]

Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"

It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.

Oh that is a pain - I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all - ever tried getting stuff to work on BSD?? Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.

I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.

Back in the Red Hat Linux 6 days (that's 2000, not RHEL 6 which isn't out yet), I had to download and install a kernel module to let me use the Lucent winmodem in my Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop. This is probably because winmodem drivers are non-free, which in turn is because v.90 is patented. And how does "never" meet your "Internal Intel software modem"?

I also played around with Red Hat 6 back in the day. Don't get me started on that. Thankfully Linux has come a long way since then. Oh and Mandrake Linux - remember the Wizard?

And you got me on the modem - I have never needed to use it, so my "Never needed to" will translate to someone else's "Needed To," there are still downloadable drivers available though.

For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card)

I wasn't making such a distinction. Forward-thinking restaurants and hotels used to provide Ethernet jacks for each patron. Now they have switched from 100BASE-TX to Wi-Fi, just a change in layer 1 without a corresponding change in the layer 2-3 network policy above it.

Okay. It still is less of an issue than is was a few uears ago. And I submit, if a driver can be downloaded, it can be installed from the CD, and hence be included with the hardware. Most CD's have enough space on them to allow for the .deb, .rpm and source together with the dependencies (if any, they can be rolled in with the binary as one "driver" if need be - why this is not done more often is beyond me)

On reading your final comment I realise you might have meant "No enclosed drivers on the CD" as opposed to "No Drivers Available At All"

Correct.

but my counterpoint is that the large majority of hardware out there works out of the box with Linux, and hence needs no drivers.

It depends on which releases of your distribution you follow. A hobbyist has the time to follow Ubuntu from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty, but if you're trying for a stable environment, for example at work, you're probably going from one long-term-supported release to the next, so the hardware support of Hardy out of the box remains relevant for about another year. And often, the official driver enables features that the developers of the free driver don't know how to turn on, such as OpenGL acceleration on some video cards.

There still is a ways to go, but as far as an LTS goes there are improvements coming down the line in the form of updates, and drivers can be downloaded. And if you are at a place of work surely you should have access to at least one company/techie who is worth his salt and can make sure your hardware works with your software?

Re:Fault != problem

[LWATCDR]

And if the driver is for the network card how do you download it? What about if it is for the SATA controller? Or even the motherboard chipset? Sometimes you can not download the driver. But how you get the driver on the system isn't really the issue here.

You don't really understand Linux drivers. Even small kernel changes currently can break a driver. There is no way to create a binary driver and put it on a website or CD and besure that it will work with any given distro.
It isn't just about RPMs and Debs but that is also an issue it is about a lack of a stable binary interface. Right now you can not write a driver and release a binary driver and know with any certainty that it will work with the next 2.6 kernel that comes out.
Driver should work for every version of 2.6 that comes out. That is the real benfit to a stable binary interface. It is something that Windows does do well. XP drivers tend to work for all builds of XP. Many of them will work for Vista as well. Printers and Graphics cards are the big exceptions. As far as I know Vista drivers will work for Windows 7. That makes everybody but the OS developers life a lot simpler.

Re:Fault != problem

[morgan_greywolf]

Without already owning a working printer, how do I print out the hardware compatibility list to carry it into the store?

Ever heard of one of these and this?

And for people who rely on donated hardware (e.g. non-profit organizations, or recipients of birthday or Christmas presents), how do they get donors to respect the HCL?

You ask for specific hardware. People do it all the time.

Re:Fault != problem

[tepples]

Ever heard of [pencil] and [paper]?

So I have a list of hundreds of supported printers. But I don't know which ones are in stock at the local Best Buy store, and there are too many models for me to jot down.

Re:Fault != problem

[tepples]

I am in support, and let me tell you, one of the things you do is download the newest driver from the vendor's website. Why is it OK do do this for Windows and not for Linux?

Because you need the old version of the driver for a network card on your system to get to the vendor's website in order to download the latest driver. Even if a WLAN driver supports only 802.11b and not g or n, or 10BASE-T and not 100BASE-TX or Gigabit, 802.11b or 10BASE-T is still a fat enough pipe to get a driver down.

Re:Fault != problem

[morgan_greywolf]

So I have a list of hundreds of supported printers. But I don't know which ones are in stock at the local Best Buy store, and there are too many models for me to jot down.

Yeah, but Best Buy only sells these brands: HP, Lexmark, Canon, and Epson. Of those, virtually everything by HP will work, and the rest will work partially, though some Epson models will work 100%.

You don't need to write down every friggin' model, just the printers that look promising. Plus, you can always look on Best Buy's website.

I just noticed something:

[Hurricane78]

Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments.

I can't find this Ok, but object to Microsoft doing the same thing wit Java back when they were making their own version, and got (rightfully) sued for it.

If it's a custom compiler, I think they should not call it Java anymore. If it's a custom Library, it should be a portable library, that can be used on any Java system.

What do you think?
(Please, no fanboyism. :)

already been done

[speculatrix]

android has already been hacked onto non-google hardware using a variety of linux distros including poky, angstrom and ubuntu.

the news first broke in January at linuxdevices

Google SDK?

[xianthax]

am I missing something or isn't there already an Android emulator in the SDK from google? Isn't this just a rewrite of the same thing?

Donated hardware

[tepples]

I'll say it again: You have to buy hardware that works right in Linux

In other words, you have to choose Linux before you choose to buy hardware, not afterward. That makes it much more expensive for a current user of Windows to switch to Linux than it would otherwise be. I owned the scanner in question before I tried installing Linux on the PC.

just as you have to buy hardware that works right in Mac OS X

There's a logo on the front of the box of hardware that comes with a Mac OS X driver. There's no logo and no driver for Linux.

Most (all?) of the Canon LIDE scanners are fully supported under SANE.

Had I known that I would eventually want to switch to Linux before I bought my scanner, I might have bought a Canon instead.

And, oh yeah, since SANE supports network transparency, the scanner is shared out on my network so I can scan using any of my laptops or mine or my wife's desktop, etc. scross the network, in a completely transparent fashion.

But does that matter much? If you aren't close to the PC to which the scanner is connected, you can't put the document on the scanner to scan in the first place. It isn't like a printer, where you can print, walk to the printer, and remove the document from the output tray. If you have a document on the scanner, you monopolize the scanner until you remove the document.

A penguin logo, while it would be nice, is not needed. Since you already need to research hardware before you buy it, you'll know what models works and don't work before you even get to the store.

Without already owning a working printer, how do I print out the hardware compatibility list to carry it into the store? And for people who rely on donated hardware (e.g. non-profit organizations, or recipients of birthday or Christmas presents), how do they get donors to respect the HCL?

wired network

Does that include 56K modems for people living in the country who grow the food you eat?

Re:Donated hardware

[morgan_greywolf]

In other words, you have to choose Linux before you choose to buy hardware, not afterward. That makes it much more expensive for a current user of Windows to switch to Linux than it would otherwise be. I owned the scanner in question before I tried installing Linux on the PC.

You have to choose Mac OS X before you choose to buy hardware. You actually have to choose Windows before you choose to buy hardware, but it's not so clear cut since there is a huge array of hardware that works with Windows.

There's a logo on the front of the box of hardware that comes with a Mac OS X driver. There's no logo and no driver for Linux.

Again, irrelevant. If the hardware in question works with Linux, there is already a driver. A logo would be convenient, but then, you need to research what works and what doesn't.

But does that matter much? If you aren't close to the PC to which the scanner is connected, you can't put the document on the scanner to scan in the first place. It isn't like a printer, where you can print, walk to the printer, and remove the document from the output tray. If you have a document on the scanner, you monopolize the scanner until you remove the document.

Yes, it does matter. With network transparency, it doesn't matter which PC I am logged into. I may have applications installed on one that I don't have on the other, for instance. It's a matter of convenience. There are sufficiently long USB cables to locate the scanner away from the PC.

Why Mac OS X != FreeBSD

[tepples]

I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all

For one thing, Mac OS X has a more stable kernel ABI, compared to the Linux kernel ABI that changes on purpose to make life harder for developers of non-free drivers. For another, drivers for some peripherals run in user mode and thus sit on top of the NeXTstep-style parts of Mac OS X, not on top of the BSD subsystem.

Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.

If everyone ran GNUstep, not GNOME or KDE or Xfce, you might have a point.

And if you are at a place of work surely you should have access to at least one company/techie who is worth his salt and can make sure your hardware works with your software?

I am that person. But we bought a lot of hardware before I came to the company, back when it was still a 100% Windows shop.

Re:Developer tools - eclipse died in Debian

[BerkeleyDude]

The primary problem is that eclipse is not being actively maintained upstream in Debian. It is in some ways rather hard to package which has to be actively maintained much like firefox, and nobody has stepped up to take it over. If nothing changes, I would not be surprised to see eclipse eventually dropped in Debian and by extension in Ubuntu.

And yet, people keep arguing that centralized repositories are the way to go, and there's no need for projects like autopackage. Do we expect Eclipse developers to maintain a Debian package for it? As well as packages for RedHat, Suse, and all the other distros while they're at it?

Re:What?

[CarpetShark]

Spam on slashdot. Good call. You probably just got added to thousands of admin's web filters.