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.

Comments

Sounds funky but

[mSparks43]

Why?

Re:Sounds funky but

[ByOhTek]

Same reason as SSH - it's a convenient platform. It'd be nice, if I needed to do something work related (or access something on my home machine) to have an available X session.

Re:Sounds funky but

[Tubal-Cain]

How dare you defile vim with X11!

Re:Sounds funky but

[GameboyRMH]

Maybe we can run a Linux desktop environment. And then add some common apps that are used among many POSIX-compliant operating systems. And then get rid of all the stuff that requires Google services, and add a compiler so we can run whatever we want.

We could call this flavor of Android the Generally Normal User-environment Linux, or GNU/Linux for short.

Re:Sounds funky but

[jedidiah]

Quite. X is just a remote graphics framework. The app could be created with a tablet in mind. It doesn't have to be a conventional desktop app. You can treat the phone as a peripheral for your TV or or PC without dealing with the nonsense of IR transmitters.

Run any app you like. Skip the nonsense with walled gardens.

Re:Sounds funky but

[harrkev]

No, you probably CAN'T play games. Really, I just played around with it. Close to useless.

For example, nedit won't start. Emacs won't start. You CAN start an xterm, and then have access to all terminal goodness, but there are SSH clients for Android that will do just as well.

The feat if truly impressive, but not enough of "X" is implemented to make it much more than a toy.

When you try to run something serious, this is what you get:

X Error: BadImplementation (server does not implement operation) 17
    Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
    Resource id: 0x0
X Error: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error) 16
    Major opcode: 72 (X_PutImage)
    Resource id: 0x0

Cool concept, but it needs more work to be truly usable for anything beyond "xeyes" or "xclock."

Crap. The WORST SECURITY thing to tell people.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Crap. The WORST SECURITY thing to tell people.

[Unknown Lamer]

Well, the article implies that he hasn't implemented xhost security yet so it's kind of a moot point right now :)

Note this is not X.org, but a new implementation of an X11 server in Java. Which is pretty neat if you ask me.

SSH, I hope?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I hope that nobody would actually consider a remote X session without tunnelling over ssh...