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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."
Sorry, but it was just not impressive. Seems to me Android has more interesting visuals in its robotic fingernail than Inferno on mobile has.
It is a start, not something complete -- we all need to start somewhere. You don't need a lot of imagination to see that once they attract more developers then they may get something that can provide true competition to Android & iOS.
But: why would anyone bother when they have a choice anyway ? Applications written using Limbo seem nice & small, small is good on something like a mobile 'phone. Probably lots of other reasons -- but I don't know enough about it. I was a little concerned to see that the GUI is based on Tk, this is quite old, will it be up to the job for the high quality graphic apps that some people want ?
Whatever: competition is good!
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.
Fuck fancy visuals.
The idea in Inferno is that your phone, your desktop, the cloud and your mate's computer are all the same file system space. You can copy data between all these devices, seamlessly, securely and quickly. "Data" is anything represented as a file, so that's music and documents, your phone's cpu, speaker and microphone, or even the applications your currently running on your desktop.
Plan9 and Inferno are about addressing networking and adding operating system support for it. The developers don't consider modern OS as networked. This is a project to make every computer attached to the network, as far as the user is concerned, the same computer, and the idea is to do it at the OS level, not the browser.
You want the yet to be programmed Inferno equivalent of Office on your phone? It's there. Not just as an installable application but that instance you have running on your desktop right now is also available to you on your phone via an exported file system either to stream over the network or you could just copy the running instance...
Fuck fancy visuals.
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
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.
Because SNOBOL wouldn't have a chance in there.
OS9 Vista Rebecca Black Countless other bits of more instantly forgotten crap. Don't kid yourself, without a core the shell is just a shell. I mean if this guy had made a pretty GUI in Flash you'd of been here posting "this is awesome!"? No, you wouldn't, you'd see it for the substance-less crap it is. You've forgotten the massive amount of work that it's taken for your fancy visuals to come about, DECADES of work on ugly software. And you guys don't half ask for the earth. Where would we be if when Linus had posted the Linux kernel everyone just went "This sucks. Why is there no GUI?".