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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."
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.
Anybody want my mod points?
I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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.
Forward to what? CLI?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
> 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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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 $100 for each app to be in the store per year). Then there is the general buggyness of it (hard resets everywhere, etc) in my experience battery life has suffered too (but having not ran a phone with 2 OSes on it I can't tell with certainty, but it sure seems less).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Even Microsoft employees would rather have an iPhone than Windows Mobile.
My blog
"Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments." Is this not exactly what Sun sued Microsoft for? It's ok for Google, but M$ gets sued?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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!
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.
.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.
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
Sure, one can download it manually but it kinda defeats the purpose of having a package manager for such scenarios.
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.
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.
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!"
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.