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Inferno OS Running On Android Phones
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."
My fork of the Inferno OS, tweaked to run on Android
and more
The Hellaphone runs Inferno directly on top of the basic Linux layer provided by Android. We do not even allow the Java system to start. Instead, emu draws directly to the Linux framebuffer (thanks, Andrey, for the initial code!) and treats the touchscreen like a one-button mouse. Because the Java environment doesn't start, it only takes about 10 seconds to go from power off to a fully-booted Inferno environment.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I hadn't heard of Inferno, so watched the video.
Sorry, but it was just not impressive. Seems to me Android has more interesting visuals in its robotic fingernail than Inferno on mobile has.
Seems barely better than operating a phone from a terminal session.
So I clicked the link about what Inferno is (Bell Labs' distributed computing effort), which DID sound interesting, but was hard to jive with what I'd seen on the phone.
I think it's great that new stuff is being ported to mobile devices, and like the idea of dumping Java completely from a phone, but... I don't think Inferno is ready for actual usage yet, not even for hackers.
Kudos on the effort, and I do hope it leads to more mobile options in the future, but for now, meh.
I wish I could do the same with MeeGo.
No, it just has really lousy CPU throttling. (Ba-dum, tssh.)
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"No, it just has really lousy CPU throttling. (Ba-dum, tssh.)"
Of course Inferno (plan 9) is 25 years old. Inferno is a 10 - 15 year old newer version of it. ... oh wait people here still use XP which is also 10 years old so nevermind.
http://saveie6.com/
If I recall, it's meant for distributed computing. Applications written in Limbo can run across multiple machines witout even being aware that they're doong it.
Folks that haven't just arrived here are well aware of Inferno
Inferno is an offshoot of Plan 9, a AT&T research OS created by such luminaries as Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie.
It looks vastly worse
Phone people...
was a joke?
No joke. Replacing the entire Java stack in Android with Inferno is not a joke. In fact, I'm certain it is far beyond anything you will ever accomplish.
If people cannot see the potential of this... so much for slashdot being for programmers...
I think that there's a rather wide difference between using a ten-year-old research operating system and a ten-year-old consumer OS. (And, furthermore, that Vista didn't exactly help.)
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Running X on a touchscreen device is awful. I have one - a Sharp netwalker, impulse buy - that does exactly that, runs ubuntu on an ARM cpu with unusable keyboard and a decent resistive touchscreen. X is slow, slow, slow, apps are even slower, and using those keyboard+mouse thingies on a device that is meant to have a stylus is beyond awful.
The Android UI makes is perfectly usable. The only trouble is that since Sharp has stopped support, but not provided details on how it boots etc. so you have to run the Android as a service on top of the linux; and that some things aren't working inside android - like the battery meter.
In other words, until someone rewrites X to support touch reasonably well, thanks but no thanks
Are you sure you're on the right website?
Next you'll say you haven't heard of Plan 9 or that it's just a crappy movie. Or that you don't know who Rob Pike or Ken Thompson are.
And yes it won't make for anything usable for someone who wants to, oh I don't know, make a phone call. But this isn't "Consumer Phones For Idiots" either.
Unfortunately, the sort of seamless network-agnostic computing Plan 9 and its descendants enabled is now a commercial threat to all the other players in the mobile space. Half the point of the "cloud computing" trend is to lock people in to one provider's weakly interacting web service, and, by extension, into the controlled ecosystem of third-party services that do interoperate well with it. Plan 9 is too good at what it does to be successful.
This OS is definitely not pretty, but it seems more like a functional OS than a visual "Future Look" OS. I bet all of the crazy graphics compositing and overhead of the typical Android Java VM/OS is enough to slow it down significantly. Without those I bet my phone or tablet would be seriously fast.
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
...I write a review about Inferno OS in a newspaper:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11296162/Inferno.jpg
Yep, it's nostalgic! ;-)
Now I have a use for his POS Inspire (I hope). Had to go back to my 3GS while I wait on the iPhone 5 and stuff that thing in a drawer. I know I should have recognized I hated it during th return period, but I was trying to like it.
Replacing the entire Java stack in Android with Inferno is not a joke.
I'd like to add that Java and Inferno are contemporaries whose purposes were much the same. There are some articles kicking around explaining Inferno vs Java in more detail. On the one hand, Java was slow, bloated, and not too portable. On the other hand, Inferno was quick, small, portable*, and marketed by AT&T. So naturally Java became popular.
* 386, Arm, Mips, Power, Sparc, WinNT, Linux, *BSD, Internet Explorer plug-in, Mac OS X, Solaris, Irix, and probably more.
-- Colonel Simon Vale, Plan 9 Internet Defense Force (Ret.)
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.
"Abandon all hope, ye who port here."
Having lived with the openmoko as my only phone for nearly three years I can safely say the novelty of a community developed ui with barely functioning code for basic tasks wears off quickly. SHR was terrible to live with along with every other distribution
...But can it run Linux?
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Because SNOBOL wouldn't have a chance in there.
working on nuclear bombs or some such at Sandia?
Or is this going to be the new control interface for the bombs?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
First, I just want to give a great kudos to the Inferno developers who made this new Inferno-based Android. I am really impressed by what you guys have accomplished. For those that critizise the UI: They even mention that in the youtube video that the UI at the moment is based on Tk which is outdated. An idea that I got was that perhaps an EFL ( http://www.enlightenment.org/ ) port/binding to limbo would be the perfect match. 1) Language-wise: In contrast to its competitors GTK and QT, it is based on C rather than C++. 2) EFL already has its uses in embedded UIs, including phones. 3) Ideology-wise: EFL is permissively (BSD) licensed and fits nicely with the Android userland (Apache) and Inferno (MIT/X) licensed parts.
Hey, AT&T really does suck that bad at some things...the mobile people saw the logo of the Evil Empire and ran away....
Oops..was I supposed to push that button?
The fancy visuals are the bit you put on once you've screwed down the side of the case and not while the bits are all still hanging out. If you hunt around the net there are thousands of dead "projects" that are nothing but concept art because they paid almost 100% of effort to form instead of function. Once you work out what the hell you are doing you then start to have some idea of how to present it in a pleasing way to the user. Projects such as a revival of Plan9 are not yet anywhere near the point where it's know what options should be available let alone how to present them.
If it was being pushed as something finished you would have a point. It isn't so IMHO you don't.
It's a bizzare shame that X is a hell of a lot faster on something like a SparcStation5 than on much faster hardware with a theoretically more optimised X. X itself isn't the problem, somebody's really crappy implementation of it when they already have the source code is the problem.
So that's speed, but touch is a different problem that has to be sorted out a the window manager level.
it's not a dalvik application.
it's a native application, which uses android for drivers. it runs as directly as any linux app on any linux.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How many thousand aPpZ are there in the Inferno stawwwrrr?!
five.
but real questions: is the phone functionality rock solid and how long does the charge last and is it gpu accelerated?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Maemo runs X and native Linux apps on smartphones and tablets. I love it. Sadly, it hasn't really caught on.
Seems like it wouldn't be hard, just need an X.org or whatever with framebuffer support. X.org might be too big though, a stripped down non-networkable X might offer better performance.
If it were non-networkable, it wouldn't be X. But stripping it down hardly seems necessary; you can run Linux + X.org in 64 MB RAM (and I'm sure it can be done in less), and most smartphones have a lot more memory than that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think what amazes me even more than getting Inferno running are the responses here and other place. How few people ( outside of the Plan 9 community ) actually seem to understand what is going on here. Even when you explain it to them.
I really thought 'geeks' were supposed to be smarter than this, but it they look more like regular users that are just wearing a pocket protector to look cool.
Rather disappointing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So the third post asking "WTF is inferno" is a troll, clearly there's either 2 other trolls asking the same question,... or I dunno maybe we actually haven't heard of this obscure thing.
Which I might add is so ugly, it quite seriously looks like the first OS written for a phone or something, it's so plain, boring and seemingly awkward to use.
So, I ask again - what am I (or rather, several of us) supposed to be excited about here? and would someone please fix the moderation.
Inferno. Gotta like it.
Brings new meaning to "blazingly fast performance" Or the latest 'hot thing.'
And firewall...
And daemons...
Of course an OS that supports migrating processes from one machine to another will need some form of checking out the imported process for malware. Purgatory?
Is code 'blessed' or 'damned'
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Or that you don't know who ... Ken Thompson [is].
Isn't he that lawyer who ended up suing Facebook because user called him a knob for wanting to ban violent video games?
I jest!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Hurray! Now the UI can be the state of the art in UI design for 1994!
Great that they got it running in some form, whether as an app overlay or something significantly more low-level, but it doesn't really interest me from a technical level, and from a practical level it's like taking the powertrain and drive train from a Model T (complete with totally different controls) to a 2007 Honda Civic.
Actually, THAT would be kind of cool =) This is "we put Who Cares? in a Who Cares?"