Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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...
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.
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
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
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.
No, native apps still use the Android APIs (mostly). This is a separate OS that is built using the core of Android.
You can't press home and go back from Inferno into Android. And MacGyver2210 is right.
Android is much more than that, however. Android drags along with it a custom libc that renders its code and libraries incompatible with standard Linux systems.
Because SNOBOL wouldn't have a chance in there.
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.