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Inferno OS Running On Android Phones

Posted by Soulskill on from the hot-stuff dept.

New submitter Digi-John writes "Employees at Sandia National Labs have put the Inferno OS on Android-based phones, replacing the default Java UI. Applications are written in Limbo rather than Java. The full announcement is at the bitbucket repository, and a short video demonstrates some of its capabilities."

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Its a native app running on Android, not an OS by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Android OS is actually a Java layer running on a Linux base code. If you never load the Dalvik VM, Zygote, or any of the Java system, you are not loading Android OS, you are loading nothing.

    Inferno replaces nothing with something. The Inferno OS system is running on the Linux abstraction layer on an Android-compatible device. It *is* an operating system, and is *not* 'running on Android OS'.

    --
    If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
  2. Re:Is this some kind of nostalgia thing? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Inferno(at least if true to its Plan9 from Bell Labs roots) is pretty much "more unix than unix".

    Instead of unix's "everything is a file, except a bunch of special stuff", that is actually carried through. Also, there is a robust network filesystem included. By comparison to virtually everything else, we are talking crazy elegant manipulation of pretty much everything throughout an N node networked environment. It's really pretty cool.

    Unfortunately, it is also "more unix than unix" in the sense that it is more obscure, less widely supported, and more nerds-only-need-apply than are conventional unix and unixlikes... It's too bad, really.