The larger FOSS community around Android dev phones? [LWN.net]

The larger FOSS community around Android dev phones?

Posted Nov 16, 2009 15:10 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
Parent article: Android Dev Phone 2 available

Not to say it's not a great thing (it is), but "fully open" is quite brave to say usually. I generally expect / wait that fully open devices (software-wise) will eventually get alternative free operating systems running on it - so, looking forward to having Debian, Gentoo etc. running as the only operating system on Android dev phones without sacrificing hw features. Maybe Android VM + UI being packaged for other distributions on top of GNU libc, and maybe even FreeSmartphone.Org stack for Android hw platforms with some glue so that SHR & Paroli would work for the phone UI... etc. etc.

So my question is that is there a community site / portal available for any of this kind of stuff, or are the efforts still mostly on utilizing the Google's Android software? Usually when I run into Android pages everyone expects the Android hw to run Android sw and maybe something else only in chroot, but I am generally not too keen on own C library implementations and all that stuff related to the Android software.

Anyway, it's great to have continuation for the dev phones series, since the other Android phones are quite closed.

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The larger FOSS community around Android dev phones?

Posted Nov 16, 2009 15:36 UTC (Mon) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

Well, Corbet did call it a "fully open _Android_" phone.

The most active Android (system) hacking place has always been XDA's "Dream Development" forum. While the forum is mostly user oriented, it is AFAIK the one place where all the developers meet and get their announcements done.

But everyone seems to be running only the Android stack. I think that with the release of Nokia's N900, many people interested in a "GNU/Linux" like system will be targeting the N900.

[...]

I am not particularly impressed by the Sapphire as a hardware platform. The big news here IMHO is that the ADP program is giving signs of continuity.

The larger FOSS community around Android dev phones?

Posted Nov 17, 2009 19:52 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Thanks for the information. Indeed it seems it's much more probable that N900 wins in the aspect of using some other OS stack besides the shipped one without sacrificing (hw) features. I was mainly just getting confirmation for that. For now I'm sticking with my FreeRunner but in 1-2 years there are hopefully other options in the market as well. Once you've used Debian on your phone you don't want to switch... ;)