Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry (New York Times) [LWN.net]

Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry (New York Times)

Posted Apr 4, 2009 12:33 UTC (Sat) by sim0n (guest, #16432)
In reply to: Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry (New York Times) by tzafrir
Parent article: Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry (New York Times)

Linux is not an operating system but a kernel... details aside ;-) ... yes
you can "run your Linux programs on Android".
Why shouldn't you be able to ?

They have a pretty standard, but minimal, base system, where their android
stuff runs on top of it (unless they've stripper it further since the last
time I had a look at it...).

(Log in to post comments)

Pretty standard? Hardly.

Posted Apr 4, 2009 18:58 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

They have a pretty standard, but minimal, base system, where their android stuff runs on top of it.

Have you actually tried to check facts before answering? Bionic is pretty darn stripped libc and their utilites don't even try to pretent they support POSIX. It's kind of Unix-like environment, but it's not Unix at all. And "Adroid stuff" is not really tied to Linux - they can switch to other kernel if it and when it'll be feasible.

The fact that GNU/Linux was called just Linux for years now returns to bite you: most people say "Linux" and assume it's kind of GNU/Linux where you can use "normal Linux programs" - and Android is quite different from that.

Pretty standard? Hardly.

Posted Apr 5, 2009 19:51 UTC (Sun) by sim0nx (subscriber, #23065) [Link]

>>They have a pretty standard, but minimal, base system, where their
android stuff runs on top of it.

>Have you actually tried to check facts before answering? Bionic is
>pretty darn stripped libc and their utilites don't even try to pretent
>they support POSIX. It's kind of Unix-like environment, but it's not
>Unix at all.

Never said they were using glibc and were completely POSIX compliant or
anything like your regular XYZ-distro ;-)
I simply meant that you can have a shell, some regular at least unix-like
tools etc...

>And "Adroid stuff" is not really tied to Linux - they can switch to other
>kernel if it and when it'll be feasible.

When did I say it was Linux tied ?

>The fact that GNU/Linux was called just Linux for years now returns to
>bite you: most people say "Linux" and assume it's kind of GNU/Linux where
>you can use "normal Linux programs" - and Android is quite different from
>that.

I don't care what people "assume" ... Linux is the kernel, not
GNU/Linux... but as I said "details aside".
And you're wrong, it doesn't return to bite me as I was just quoting the
other comment ;-).