Android = Google Desktop Linux?

[modicr]

Hello!

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article ... =4&fpid=18

Specifically, the two got Android running in desktop Linux mode on a netbook, the Asus Eee PC 1000H. This is a pretty standard netbook. If you can get Android to run on it, you shouldn't have much trouble getting it to work on any desktop.

While it is true that Android's applications are written in the JVM (Java Virtual Machine, Dalvik, instead of Linux developers' eternal favorites, Gnu C or C++, Android already includes a set of C/C++ libraries. So, porting GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) shouldn't be that difficult. After that's done, bringing over OpenOffice 3.0 or the like would be trivial.

http://ranahammad.wordpress.com/2009/01 ... platforms/

Smartphone programming is booming. The little leash that lets your boss reach out and ruin your time off is turning into a platform of seemingly infinite possibilities. It’s more than just iPhone applications that simulate a glass of beer that drains as the accelerometer measures the amount of tilt. The new smartphones can act as a wallet, a personal shopper, a personal trainer, and a source of endless amusement.

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/01/23/a-w ... nt-page-1/

The G1 was originally released by T-mobile and locked to their network. Since I’m an AT&T customer and we don’t even have T-mobile coverage in my area, I figured I’d have to wait until unlocked versions of this phone showed up on eBay before I’d be able to get my hands on one.
But now it’s even easier to get an unlocked G1… You just sign up as a developer at the Android Market. Don’t worry, you don’t have to prove that you can write a Hello World program in C++ or anything like that. You just login, sign-up, pay the $25 registration fee and presto, you’re a bona fide G1 developer. Then you can immediately buy a totally unlocked G1 for $399, which is just what I did.

Cheers, Roman

[Antonio Linares]

Roman,

I have already been able to boot several computers with Google Android as the computer operating system

I used a pendrive as a USB boot device. Standard x86 PCs. Though it uses the Linux kernel, its quite a different "thing" from other Linux distros. Anyhow, time will tell...

[modicr]

Hello!

• http://android-tricks.blogspot.com/2009 ... droid.html

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I had reported earlier how I had gotten a C Hello World statically-linked program running on my Android phone using CodeSourcery's toolchain (on linux). Today I got a dynamically-linked Hello World program running on the phone, compiled using Android's prebuilt toolchain from the source.

It's well known that Android uses a stripped down version of libc, called bionic. When you compile your program with static linking, you don't use bionic because well, you linked statically. This is non-ideal. You want to use the bionic library on the phone, and besides you want to compile using Android's prebuilt cross-compiler arm-eabi-gcc

If you are anxious to get things working, use agcc, a perl wrapper over arm-eabi-gcc that sets up everything for you so that you can just:
$ agcc hello.c -o hello

• http://plausible.org/andy/agcc

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# The Android toolchain is ... rough.  Rather than try to manage the
# complexity directly, this script wraps the tools into an "agcc" that
# works a lot like a gcc command line does for a native platform or a
# properly integrated cross-compiler.  It accepts arbitrary arguments,
# but interprets the following specially:
#
# -E/-S/-c/-shared - Enable needed arguments (linker flags, include
#                    directories, runtime startup objects...) for the
#                    specified compilation mode when building under
#                    android.
#
# -O<any> - Turn on the optimizer flags used by the Dalvik build.  No
#           control is provided over low-level optimizer flags.
#
# -W<any> - Turn on the warning flags used by the Dalvik build.  No
#           control is provided over specific gcc warning flags.
 

• http://android-dls.com/wiki/index.php?t ... or_Android

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The Embedded Debian project provides a simple to use toolchain for ARM EABI. To set it up: 

apt-get install emdebian-tools
emsetup --arch armel

• http://android.jim.sh/index.php/Cross_Compilation

[Antonio Linares]

Roman,

Thanks for the info

In my opinion, Android will not be an Ubuntu (or other linux distros) menace for now (neither in a close future).

In fact, Linux users share remains very low, and Android is not even available yet as an installable ISO!

[modicr]

Roman,
In my opinion, Android will not be an Ubuntu (or other linux distros) menace for now (neither in a close future).
In fact, Linux users share remains very low, and Android is not even available yet as an installable ISO!

BTW, here is an interesting analysis (+comments): http://www.osnews.com/story/21160/Linux ... he_Rescue_

Regards, Roman

[Antonio Linares]

Roman,

Thanks for the link

The problem that I lately see with Google is that they do great things (services, products) but they don't follow the "main stream" way of working.

In example: Google App Engine is a great concept, but it is totally different from Apache servers (main stream). You are forced to use Python, so they break backwards compatibility with lots of php, etc. applications. No SSH support, no FTP, no MySQL, etc.

These kind of mistakes can really hurt a company, in the long term, even if it is powerful one. See what is happening these days to Sun Microsystems: it is quite close to get acquired by IBM because it is not profitable.

Android is a great concept, but it is not being properly implemented and promoted. They should have used a well known distro like Ubuntu or similar. But they want to be in control, like usual (the same error that many companies do). So they are starting all over again, in a total different way, and that will require many years to get popular, if ever. Thats my opinion

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

Wise words. I agree.

EMG