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Ubuntu Touch On a Nexus 7: "Almost Awesome"
colinneagle writes "I installed Ubuntu Touch "1.0" on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet and have been using it as my main tablet system for the last four days. Here's how it went. First off, the installation was surprisingly painless. I followed the official instructions and didn't encounter a single problem. That being said, the installation is really geared toward software developers, power users or people already comfortable on a Linux command line. If you're not in one of those categories, I recommend holding off for the time being. Once installed, Ubuntu Touch booted up rather quickly — in only just a few seconds (a fair bit faster than Android 4.x on the same tablet). And, immediately, I was presented with a short tutorial that appears the first time the system is booted, which, I might add, has got to be one of the slickest, least annoying tutorials I've seen. But... there were problems. The battery life was, to put it mildly, terrible. Performance has been mixed, and the OS was prone to what I call 'The Pulsating Seizure Feature' a few dozen times over the weekend. In a nutshell: launching apps (and, occasionally, moving between apps) can cause the device to freeze and begin flashing the screen rapidly."
is it smoother?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This will be the year of the linux tablet.
Though technically it's always been.
Cyanogenmod is doing a good job getting a more unified version of Android on many vendor's devices. I have several devices using it and it works well. (http://www.cyanogenmod.org/)
How much freer could Android be? The entire platform is open source.
The only thing proprietary are the video drivers and that's because GPU vendors are douche bags.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Seriously.. "Almost Awesome" ... this sounds a lot like a nightmare and border line unusable.. I can only imagine the headlines if this was a windows device that failed to function. Which by the way windows 7/8 mobile has been smooth since day 1..
Have the Ubuntu releases wrapped around, then? I thought we were at "Teething Tapir" or some such thing.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
How much freer could Android be? The entire platform is open source.
The only thing proprietary are the video drivers and that's because GPU vendors are douche bags.
It could be a lot more free. At least it's already clear it's heading in the opposite direction when it comes to improvements from Google based on the article over at Ars Technica.
How much freer could Android be? The entire platform is open source.
The only thing proprietary are the video drivers and that's because GPU vendors are douche bags.
....Android is a mix of a whole bunch of licenses. That are likely to be APACHE (Source for hoycomb anyone) as much as they under GPL...and even Linux is famously a slightly amended GPL License. The first party applications...which in my opinion are what makes Android, are not only proprietary, they work is actually done remotely in the cloud, something RMS speaks badly about for reasons.
That said if you really want to know about free from the lad himself this is Dick on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html Android which discusses all kind of interesting things including...Replicant a truly free android. As a pleasant aside https://f-droid.org/ is an open source app store with open source programs, a must for those more careful with there software, and another feather in the cap of the awesome Android.
I had it installed on my Nexus 4 and it was a heaping steaming pile of crap. Kept dropping data connections and phone calls were full of bugs like not being able to hang up, or the phone app crashing when you press dial.
My favorite was the notification of incoming call just failing to appear until the carrier sent it to voicemail.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The market, google apps, bundled apps with your phones, and, well, most of what can be installed with the market are not open source, in fact the AOSP versions of google apps lacks some functionality. With cyanogenmod and f-droid as market you get something closer to being open source with the exception that you pointed out.
I'd like to introduce to my new car. It's almost awesome; except when the engine stalls, or the accelerator sticks at maximum revs, or the doors won't open or the wheels sometimes fly off when I'm going 60mph. But other than that, it's a dream!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Except don't expect CyanogenMod to be in the future https://plus.google.com/106978520009932034644/posts/L8FJkrcahPs .Ironically because open source is the reason for their assistance they seem to be trying hard to wreck a great model fro them.
https://plus.google.com/106978520009932034644/posts/L8FJkrcahPs This is Guillaume Lesniak Google+ post about CyanogenMod's Focal camera app. He doesn't like that licensing changes accompanying the new venture would limit his control. Accordingly, he has removed Focal from CyanogenMod
Moderately Mediocre is 12 major releases beyond Almost Awesome, so we'll see it in late 2019.
Cyanogenmod is doing a good job getting a more unified version of Android on many vendor's devices. I have several devices using it and it works well. (http://www.cyanogenmod.org/)
I have to agree. Currently running it on a Nexus 4 & 1st gen 7 as well as a 1st gen Kindle with no problems whatsoever.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
Vanishingly few here understand the problem of battery life on these ARM devices. A desktop OS cannot- repeat cannot ever have a decent battery life on such a device. Why?
Low power ARM SoC devices are designed with MULTIPLE, special purpose low-power hardware blocks, that run as much of the actual processing as possible. Playing an MP3 or video, for instance, is NOTHING like the implementation path on Linux or Windows, even with hardware acceleration. The Android device actually has special pathing for such operations, where hardware solutions independent of the normal CPU cores is triggered, allowing the CPU system to enter a minimum power-state.
DOING NOTHING is another key part of Android. Doing nothing is MEANINGLESS as a Windows or Linux concept. Doing nothing is everything on a mobile OS, where the device is constantly looking for such a time in order to enter the lowest power state for a 'running' device' as quickly as possible.
ARM SoC devices are a new computer paradigm, and this is something old-school nerds cannot get their heads around. Why did Apple HATE Flash on mobile devices? Because Flash CANNOT be made power-efficient - it is a "throw CPU resources at the problem" solution, and a lousy match for mobile devices.
This means that mobile ARM devices will NEVER be a good match for continuous computer processing applications that cannot be handled by dedicated hardware blocks, but how much heavy general CPU based-processing does a mobile device need to do?
Linux on a tablet is moronic. Windows on a tablet is moronic. Go to a laptop format with a MUCH larger battery, and now ordinary desktop operating systems are fine. But the issue of dedicated hardware blocks really clouds the issue. Once, Intel told us we needed their latest CPU chips to play video on our desktops, then to play MP3s. Later still, Intel told us to spend hundreds of dollars on Intel chips if we wished to encode video. Or recognise speech. Or render graphics to the screen. Each of these excuses for heavy, GENERAL PURPOSE, computing elements, like Intel CPUs, has vanished. Doing any of these tasks on your CPU today is the height of foolishness.
Without most people even noticing, computers have split into two camps. The old-school computers that need to run CPU intensive tasks much of the time. And the computer 'devices' that rarely run CPU intensive code for anything but very short durations. The second class are NOT the thin-clients once mistakenly anticipated as becoming the common platform for 'devices'. The second-class are also TRUE general purpose computers, but lack the energy resources to do continuous general purpose computing calculations.
How much freer could Android be? The entire platform is open source.
The only thing proprietary are the video drivers and that's because GPU vendors are douche bags.
"Platform" is a big word. While the Android OS is free, there are more and more components of the platform that are getting closed off by Google as they move from the AOSP stack to Google Play apps. See this Ars article for a rather scathing view of Android's "openess".
This isn't cable news, strictly Ad Hominem attacks are generally not very convincing. If you have specific points about the Ars article in question, feel free to make them.
As an Android fan, and a general loather of the walled garden of iOS devices, I am concerned watching Google beginning to steer in the same direction. It is smells like bait-and-switch, especially as components that were once in the open AOSP stack are now closed source apps. There is probably fair debate about what is the "operating system" and what is "value add", but if you couple Google's move to apps along with some of the business arrangements described in the article, it's beginning to feel like old times again.
Remember the dominant operating system when this line came out?
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Let's see... how many of my android devices have come with the complete source code required to modify, rebuild, and run the software that came installed on them, without any loss of functionality?
Exactly none.
And that's the point. The Android Open Source Platform might be Free, but our phones are not running the Android Open Source Platform; they come with derivatives of it that usually depend on proprietary, closed-source differences. The result is that I don't have a reaonsable way to verify that my device is doing what I think it should be doing, or to keep it updated with security patches, or to be sure that I have disabled every bit of privacy-invading crap that hides in those commercial ROM images. The closest I can get is replacing most of the stock software with an open source alternative, which is not the same thing and (if I can manage to find one at all) usually means breaking several bits of functionality that I paid for when I bought the device.
"Almost Awesome" I think that must have been meant as a joke. Constantly crashing and crap battery life on release software is probably the opposite of awesome...at least for me. Maybe he meant that it would have been completely awesome if it managed to electrocute him or kick him in the nuts some how.
You have a point, I didn't know that 'CSM' would get omitted. Options are numerous though at least on the traditional desktop, many motherboards to choose from. The low end retail ones especially are conservative, high volume/high availability, well supported esp. Asrock and Gigabyte ones (lots of BIOS settings : it's still dead easy to find a mobo with dual PS/2, on latest gen hardware. Even LPT and RS232 if you really want it, the full ports or at least headers.
The mobo from 2003 I had before still allowed to configure 5.25" floppy drives, with choice between 1.2M and 360KB. My current one from 2007 or 2008 only allows 3.5" floppy (I don't use floppy lol, if I have to find myself needing to boot a floppy I'd rather set up another computer, build or obtain an .img file, and beam it to my PC's network card via PXE and memdisk)