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X Server Now Available For Android
New submitter mkwan writes "The open-source X Server for Android has hit beta and is now available for download through the Android Market. On Australian networks at least, smartphones are assigned publicly-accessible IP addresses, so it should be possible to display many Linux applications on an Android smartphone simply by setting the DISPLAY environment variable to the phone's IP address followed by :0"
The source is available under the MIT license (or Apache; the project page and story disagree) over at Google Code. It doesn't support all of the X protocol and there's no Xlib implementation (i.e. no X11 apps on the device yet except via the NDK if you're lucky), but it is a reimplementation of the X server in Java for Android. You can run remote applications at least.
Why?
Doing what the article says requires you to use "xhost +" as the magic cookie requirements will not have been met.
Second, even with the magic cookie, all transmissions to/from the X server are unencrypted - which means your magic cookie (the password to the X server) is passed in cleartext for anyone to see.
Having an X server on android is usefull, but also get ssh. That will securely route the X protocol (with encryption) from a remote (to the android display) system and with proper display.
I hope that nobody would actually consider a remote X session without tunnelling over ssh...
Millions of androids were oblivious... ... and continued doing what they were previously doing.
It's a niche tool, but for those of us who are in that niche, it's nice to see it available.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I suppose this should be interesting, but mostly it strikes me as dumb. Mostly as a result of Google having reinvented the wheel by creating an entirely new and no more efficient or effective rendering and windowing subsystem for Android, then having the rest of the open source community chase along behind them. I suppose that's not terribly surprising, seeing as how Android was proprietary out of the gate until Google bought them.
In other news, I'll hope that my N900 holds out and that another device, probably one from Samsung running Tizen, comes along before it fails.
Hopefully this will enable the implementation of the NX technology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology ) on Android, since using the X protocol directly over the public Internet is terribly slow.
I already use my Android phone to do some light remote work. I use ConnectBot http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/ to SSH into a remote workstation. For graphical apps, I set up port forwarding for VNC (there's a menu option for it in connectbot) and use AndroidVNC http://code.google.com/p/android-vnc-viewer/
I have my VNC server set to only accept connections from localhost (and it's firewalled, too), so that only connections which are forwarded and encrypted via SSH wind up being accepted. This way I get secure remote access, the VNC protocol tends to be less bandwidth-intensive than raw X, and it preserves my session in case I get disconnected.
Don't get me wrong, an X server on Android is a cool technical achievement, but existing SSH and VNC clients for Android are a more practical and secure way of accessing your workstations/servers on the go.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Is like getting lots of free apps at once. I think lots of people don't know that you can just display the one application that you need to run a not the whole screen.
What can you do with X that you can't do with ssh?