CyanogenMod 9 Working On the Nexus S

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about progress toward getting an AOSP build working on the Nexus S. From the article: "Over the past week, ROM Manager extraordinaire Koush has been frantically working on making a working build of CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) for the Samsung Nexus S. The custom ROM, which is built purely from the Android Open Source Project, has now reached 'alpha 11.' All major features are present and no significant bugs remain. It's too early to say that the build is ready for prime time or mission-critical work — the final release of CM9 is due in the new year — but it's certainly stable enough for daily use. The most significant feature, if you can call it that, is that Koush's build of ICS is really very smooth — it's as nimble as Gingerbread, if not more so. Unlike the previous, non-CM build that was released last week, this alpha build of CM9 has every feature enabled, including Google Wallet, and setting a mobile data limit. As usual, the custom ROM is pre-rooted, has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware. "

Comments

Yay

[masternerdguy]

I want a real linux distro, not google's vision of how linux should be. Let me know when I can load Debian, SuSe, Fedora, etc, on my phone and then we'll talk.

Re:Yay

[Kenja]

Done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN4c61ETCWg Totally useless of course, but knock yourself out. Just hope you dont need to make calls on your "phone".

Re:Yay

[Kenja]

So you want a Nokia N900. Not too many people did, which is why it was dropped.

Re:Yay

[PitaBred]

You sure are demanding and lazy, aren't you?

Re:Yay

[mjwx]

Then it hasn't met my standards, because it's no longer a phone. I want an open source program I can compile and install on my distro of choice that lets me use it as a phone.

Well, get coding. It's open source after all

Otherwise all this sounds like is Varuka Saltz stamping her feet and shouting "Daddy, I want it NAOOOOOOOOOOO".

As for me, I'm grateful to Cyanogen, Koush and the rest of the rather lengthy CM team for their hard work (yes I donate too). Most of us have to work with what we've got, thanks to Google we've got a great platform to work with (anyone complaining about Android never used WinMo) and thanks to people like Cyanogen, we've got an even better phone OS that is free and open.

Re:Yay

[Microlith]

No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.

But please, blame the core OS for political and managerial failures.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a pink unicorn. And it has to be able to speak English. And shit rainbows. I want it now.

Re:Yay

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.

Uh, no. It was dropped because their marketing strategy of having three guys chime in on every Slashdot smartphone thread about how great the N900 is was insufficient to gain any traction in the US.

Re:Yay

[chrb]

Not done. That is Ubuntu running in a chroot environment. And it makes phone calls fine, because Android is still present. Personally, I would love to see a real Linux distribution running on an Android device. Android has so many limitations: the bionic C library, Dalvik apps only (yeah, I know about NDK, but "real Linux" has Python, Perl, C++, OpenJDK Java etc.)

The limitations of Android stem from being targetted at 2005 phone hardware, so they created a cut-down Linux. With 2012 tablets, dual-core 1.2GHz+ CPU and 1GB+ memory, there is absolutely no reason for these artificial software limitations. I want to see Gnome on a tablet. And KDE. And other GUI environments. And I want Android to be relegated to an app-compatibility environment in the same way that Java and Mono exist today - not because that's a bad thing, but because Android is just one application environment of the many that exist on Linux. Why shouldn't tablet programmers use Python+PyQT to build their apps, deployed on Debian-style apt-get repositories? Why shouldn't we have Ubuntu for Tablets? The hardware is powerful enough now, and it is only going to get more powerful, we don't need to be hobbled by the design choices of what was (8 years ago) a small startup in California.

Re:Yay

[impaledsunset]

Debian runs on the Neo Freerunner, and there's software for the phone functionality. You can make calls, receive and send SMS, connect over GPRS and read your email, browse, use the GPS. It's usable, although running desktop apps on a phone can be frustrating sometimes. And it's slow.
There's a project to run Debian on Nokia N900, however it's incomplete and because of a few proprietary components you can't "compile and install" something to make the phone work. The community is working on replacing those.

The original OS on the phone is Maemo, which is essentially Debian-based, X-based, and you can compile and run it except for those few components. You can also run full Debian in a chroot. You can also port the apps missing in Debian from there any time you wish. It's non-trivial perhaps.

You can run Kubuntu on N900. The phone functionality in Debian and Kubuntu is being worked on.

Re:Yay

[Miamicanes]

Well... there's a little more to it than that. A "phone" environment is fundamentally different in the sense that an incoming phone call usually will (and should) stop whatever else you're doing dead in its tracks until the call is dealt with. A scheduling and notification strategy optimized for realtime multiplayer games is going to be completely dysfunctional when your real-world use case involves being able to freeze the action mid-shot and take an incoming phone call, then gracefully ease back into the action when it's finished. That's why Android makes such a big deal about differentiating between "service" and "activity" -- a service can keep running when another activity has the activity focus.

If Android apps weren't forced to divide up the workflow and separate out the parts into "things that can (and should) run in the background without a user interface", and "things that only make sense when the application has focus and the user's exclusive attention", we'd have the same problems that IOS does. Where things in Android's world become confusing is the ambiguity at the "service" end, between "things that happen occasionally on a schedule" (like polling a server), "things that happen in response to something else" (incoming communication, arrival at location, change of sensor state, etc), and "things that should happen, and keep happening, until something else gives them a reason to stop" (like music playback). Complicating things more is the fact that you can sort of *get away* with doing things in background services using threads and traditional Java sleep/wait strategies, but Android will break things that insist on doing things that way in increasingly aggressive ways (particularly Gingerbread and beyond), even when they do it in ways that are considered to be perfectly legitimate and polite in mainstream Java.

Starting with Gingerbread, Android has started becoming downright mean & aggressive towards apps that use TimerTask to schedule periodic tasks in background services instead of using alarms & intents... not quite breaking apps outright, but getting VERY aggressive about killing background services that use TimerTask with partial wakelocks in ways that even a year ago would have been considered mainstream and exceptionally well-behaved (like grabbing a partial wakelock ONLY during actual network activity, to at least ensure that the phone didn't get put to sleep halfway through a http request, even if the service itself ended up suspended until the phone was awakened by something). Now, Android will kill background services after about an hour simply because it decides they've been running for "too long", even if they've been asleep in a TimerTask for most of it. I never even noticed this until I got my Photon last month, because my previous phone (Samsung Galaxy S/Epic 4G) was stuck in Froyo-land, and my app worked flawlessly on it. I knew it didn't reliably poll when the phone was asleep, but it still managed to make it work often enough to not be a big deal. Once I got the Photon, I noticed that it was just silently dying outright after about an hour, and not coming back to life after the phone was awakened.

I can see Google's logic, but I don't think they've done a particularly good job of reaching out to developers (many of whom are still stuck in Froyo-land, if only because American carriers suck & most users are still stuck with it, often including the developers themselves). Yes, the emulator exists for newer versions, but frankly, it's so slow, even on a fast quadcore PC, I'd rather tear off my fingernails one by one than suffer its slowness (and the fact that it seems to either die, or spontaneously lose contact with Eclipse, once or twice per hour, necessitating even more delay and interruption). After I bought my new Photon, my old Epic turned into my "permanently tethered to the computer development phone".

Re:Lies

[TheReaperD]

Although Android is not a true open source project, they normally release the source code with one major exception. A lot of the argument about that was because Google refused to release the 3.x Honeycomb source code. Google themselves said that the reason they never released it was that it was a 'hack' to get Android on tablets and was not up to their quality standards and they didn't want it spread any further than necessary. They promised that they would release 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, which would meld the phone and tablet code and they have done so, leading to the CyanogenMod 9 release.

Open source vs. community development

[DragonWriter]

Although Android is not a true open source project, they normally release the source code

A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.

Android, unlike many open source projects, isn't an open community development project, but while those two things often go together, they have no necessary relationship.

Re:Open source vs. community development

[Namarrgon]

Here's a big difference: Android is pretty much entirely funded and developed by Google. It's not a community project.

Their project, their copyright, their licence, their rules. Demanding that they give you the source to everything they develop is simply childish. Be grateful for the source you get, since it cost the wider community nothing, not even time.

Re:SGS4G support Please!

[mjwx]

I have had to use ICBINB builds of Gingerbread for my Samsung Galaxy S 4G because CM7 was not available for that phone.... please please please support it for CM9!

If you're into hacking, the difference between the SGS 4G and the SGS is the radio (IIRC), so you'll need to replace the radio drivers with ones that work (I.E. one's you've backed up from the device). I had to do this on a Motorola Milestone (and the locked bootloader didn't help).

This is a "Do at your own risk" thing, if someone more knowledgeable then I has better advice, by all means please post it, mine info is 2 years out of date.

Re:Lies

[markkezner]

That's right. Just to clarify, even Honeycomb's code has been released at this point, although it's not "tagged" so it isn't as easy to get to. Google did this on purpose to encourage developers to build using the Ice Cream Sandwich code instead, which is probably better for everyone involved.

What happened to qwerty devices?

[nightfire-unique]

I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).

I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.

What happened to qwerty phones? Why did they fall so far in popularity? I find it excruciating to surrender half my screen real estate to an on-screen keyboard.

This Nexus S looks great, and is easy to root and flash, which is nice. But, without a keyboard? To me.. useless. Come on Google! Put some weight behind a qwerty model of this!

And for the love of god, start playing hardball with manufacturers that lock their bootloaders and fail to provide a clean method of rooting! Simply deny them access to the Google utilities.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[dell623]

Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail. Screens are huge these days so seeing the keyboard on screen while typing is no big issue. Instead of getting a thicker bulkier keyboard equipped phone a bigger screen phone is a better compromise. Physical Keyboards are simply inefficient on mobile devices - not that great for typing, add bulk etc.
The Galaxy Nexus kind of device with no buttons at all is the future, even the soft buttons disappear for video etc, maximizing screen real estate. Ultimately you want the smallest possible device with the biggest possible screen.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[phoenix_rizzen]

I hear you.

It would be so nice if the major Android phone manufacturers would stop spitting out new phones every 6 weeks, and instead focused on 2-3 phone hardware platforms per year. I say platforms in that they use the exact same innards (SoC, storage, etc) but with 1-2 screen sizes, and with/without keyboards.

Sony Ericsson is the closest to doing this with the Xperia Mini/Mini Pro, Xperia Neo/Pro, and Xperia Arc/Play. They all basically have the same hardware, with just screen size and keyboard/gamepad variations.

Just imagine how much simpler life would be for their Android devs, support staff, and customers if they did this.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[Microlith]

I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers.

But you aren't the customer. The customer, at least in the US, is the mobile carrier who wants to restrict you as much as possible. The fallout from this is that even in places where you can buy the device unlocked, the devices are still crippled (see Motorola.) The end result is that ~2 years on I am still using my N900.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[phoenix_rizzen]

What's the point of having a big 4" screen if you constantly lose half of it to an on-screen keyboard? Especially in landscape when vertical pixels are at a premium? If I wanted to constantly have a 1" high screen, I'd buy an older model QWERTY phone, the landscape screen size would be the same as a 4" keyboardless phone.

Not everyone buys a phone just to watch videos or play games. some buy it to use as a phone (giant screens aren't that great to talk on), or to type a lot (QWERTY phones have more usable screen space even if the actual screen is smaller), or have issues with on-screen keyboards.

There's no such thing as "the one perfect phone for everyone", just as there's no "perfect keyboard" for everyone. Hardware keyboards aren't going anywhere. Here's hoping more manufacturers add them to their offerings.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[forkazoo]

I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).

I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.

I still carry my n900, but I got an iPhone for work, and bought an Android tablet recently, and I have had the same rude awakening of just how user-friendly the n900 actually was. I have spent the last two years looking for something newer, faster, and *better* than my n900, and I just haven't found it. Given how awkwardly Maemo begat Meego which has stumbled into Tizen, I'm not even very optimistic that anything will come along in the forseeable future. I'd practically kill to have a whizzy new n900 with the latest CPU and screen, but nobody wants to sell it to me. Even the most open android thing kind of pales in comparison to the promise of a genuinely open platform.

I love the fact that I can write PyQt scripts while I am on the subway that work perfectly on my real computers when I get to the office/home. I can forward X11 apps to/from my phone just as I do with my normal computers. (Obviously, some aren't worth forwarding to a phone, but others work just fine on a touch screen.) The X11 forwarding over SSH with implausible complicated SSH tunnels between overly complicated networks is, AFAIK, impossible on Android, despite the fact that Android has VNC and ssh terminal emulator apps. In the context of working on a real big "Enterprisey" production network, having a "normal" ssh/X11 stack makes a huge difference.

I know the n900 never got Angry Birds, or whatever, but it has been an invaluable tool in a way that no other mobile device seems willing to be, not even the "very open, easy to do whatever you want" Android platform, which is disappointing.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[assantisz]

Try using an ssh client like ConnectBot with a virtual keyboard. You are losing enormous amounts of screen real estate that you need to get work done. I am in nightfire's camp - a phone without slide-out keyboard is utterly useless. I do not want to schlep around another piece of equipment in form of a bluetooth keyboard or some such. There are some hardware solutions for the iPhone 4 (cases with built-in keyboards) but the accessory market in the Android world sucks donkey balls thanks to manufacturers pumping out a new phone every 7 days.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Jesus, buy a netbook. £200-300 (half the price of the phone in your hand) and you get a keyboard with keys you can actually press (albeit not as well as a full size keyboard) and a much better screen to work on.

The thought of anyone trying to do actual work on a smartphone boggles my mind.

Not open enough

[Richard_J_N]

I bought one: it was a wonderful device (except for the touchscreen being resistive), but what killed it for us was that it had critical parts of the GUI being non-open.
We would have deployed 200 of them, but we needed one minor bugfix: the ability to operate the camera during a voip phone call (which meant being able to disable the shutter sound so as to allow the sound-card not to block). Sadly, the camera library was crippled: it's very, very easy to use Hildon (basically GTK) to access the image capture with gstreamer, but we only if we didn't use the proprietary feature called "auto-focus"! So we couldn't fix it ourselves, and when we reported the bug, the Nokia team confirmed it, but didn't actually get round to fixing it (at least, not within many weeks).

It's a real shame too: I could SSH into the phone, launch X-applications (on either $DISPLAY), install applications with a real package manager, and enjoy all the other Linux goodness.

That's the joke.

[reluctantjoiner]

Roald Dahl wasn't above pun-ishing his readers on occasion.