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Drawing the Line Between Android and Linux
jfruhlinger writes "The relationship between Linux and Android is on a technical level not hard to grasp — there's a shared kernel, but the application and interface layers are quite different. But, as Brian Proffitt points out, there are differences of philosophy and of community — which hasn't stopped Adobe from touting its Android dev tools as proof of its devotion to Linux."
"The relationship between Linux and Android is on a technical level not hard to grasp — there's a shared kernel...
Most Linux Distros -> GNU/Linux.
Linux is the kernel. Shared kernel means it's Linux.
Period. end of story.
, but the application and interface layers are quite different.
That could be said for any Linux distro.
Android is a Linux distro.
You do realize that android apps run in dalvik right? So there is always a virtual machine. I fail to see how that is any different than running it on the virtual machine running on the phone.
All the other programs running on top comprise the OS. Why can't people get this straight? There isn't just a "Linux" community, there's a GNU community, an X community, a Debian community, a GCC community, an Android community, etc. Some parts overlap and some parts don't. But to say that all of these communities is Linux is a little misleading.
First, it's called Java and it runs android apps on linux (amoung others), just like Linux runs any other app. Android doesn't make kernel bound, machine compiled apps for the very good reason that they need as many apps to run on as many phones without separate compilers. Phones are still running completely different chipsets than PCs, or are you not aware that you can't run amd64.deb on a 32bit PC, etc. etc. If so, you aren't very educated about the issue at all.
If you want to take some code, make some native applications compile to it, I'm sure you could get some command line tools that work on both platforms, compiling separately on each. Mainstream users don't CARE if they can run it on their computers. Frankly, not many geeks care either. That's a pretty minority of a minority view. At best, people would like to run Linux desktop apps on Android, not the other way around.
And the problem isn't Android, it's XWindows. When you get XWindows and Gnome/KDE to run efficiently on ARM, you let me know and THEN we'll talk about portability. Until then, NON ISSUE QED.
And even then, you'd still need a type of virtual machine, regardless of whether the code ran or not. Apps are built for.. wait for it... phones and tablets! It's pointy-multi-touchy, not lefty-righty-clicky.
The fact is that Android is the first, and only, real main stream Linux OS that rivals every single one of its competitors. What did Android do for Linux? That's like asking what Apache has done for Linux. Without Apache, Linux wouldn't have the server market cornered. Android did for linux on phones what Apache did for linux on servers. And if you don't get that analogy, you just don't get it the topic at all.
I8-D