Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts [LWN.net]

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 6:23 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
Parent article: Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

> Your editor would still like to see an alternative platform, preferably one that is closer to traditional Linux,

I'm wandering what "closer to traditional Linux" really means in the context of a tablet.

- Does it mean the X11 windowing system?
- Does it mean that all processes run as the one uid?
- Does it mean that I can get a root terminal easily?
- Does it mean I can get a terminal window where 'ls' and 'cat' work as expected?

My guess is "all of those and probably more", but which are most important, and why?

to post comments

Get me Bash

Posted Nov 21, 2012 8:43 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know for our editor, but for me "closer to Linux" would be "including GNU userland tools" and "allowing me to do things from the console". Your fourth point more or less. Right now the shell is almost unusable.

Get me Bash

Posted Nov 21, 2012 9:25 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Well adding a debian or other generic linux chroot for command line apps is quite trivial.

I also have hard time seeing value in having "something closer to linux". There is pretty much no touch-screen friendly apps for linux desktop.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 15:08 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm wandering what "closer to traditional Linux" really means in the context of a tablet.

For the low-level user-space, give me glibc, coreutils and bash in a decent terminal app and I'm satisfied. Systemd, dbus and (dpkg or rpm) would be a big bonus, but is by no means required.

The uid scheme and windowing system (Surfaceflinger, Wayland, X11, etc) is irrelevant to me, as long as both Qt and GTK+ works on it, and you can launch programs from the terminal inheriting it's environment.

I'd also want an official way of gaining a root prompt, but to me that is not about "being closer to traditional Linux" but about device ownership (if it's my computer, I should be able to do what I want with it).

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 22, 2012 20:41 UTC (Thu) by mastro (guest, #72665) [Link]

Many traditional command line tools are available from Google Play.

The official way to gain root (for Nexus devices, some other manufacturers ship modified Android versions that may make this harder) is documented in the official Android documentation: http://source.android.com/source/building-devices.html (unlock the bootloader using fastboot and install sudo from Google Play).

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 18:05 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (6 responses)

Real package management?

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 19:24 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

no, package management varies drastically from distro to distro, what Android has is within the range of what 'traditional' linux distros support.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 22, 2012 9:47 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (4 responses)

What all linux package managers generally have in common is they can manage the whole system. Not just a select group of end-user applications. Once you're on android 4.2 you're pretty much stuck on android 4.2 save for some strange update process that frankly you're lucky to get from your vendor/carrier.

As a user of debian systems that have been seamlessly updated through several releases this seems like the stone age to me.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 22, 2012 9:54 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

it may be the stone age, but it's still within the array of linux distro management. apt has had upgrades between versions forever, rpm gained it recently, many other distros still require full installs to go to a new version

Recently?

Posted Nov 22, 2012 14:34 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

I've upgrade S.u.S.E installations since my first version which was 5.2. That was in 1998. This was coincidentally also the year when APT was released. So rpm based distros allowed updates "forever" as well. Most probably even with a definition of "forever" that is longer than the one for APT.

Recently?

Posted Nov 22, 2012 23:20 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Debian allowed upgrades from one version to the next even before APT came out. I have a Debian installation on one computer that I made around 1995 or so and have only upgraded since (with an occasional »cp -a« to a new machine). This includes upgrades from a.out to ELF and from libc5 to libc6.

On the other hand, doing SUSE upgrades was touch-and-go. For example, the first SUSE I had was 7.3, and going from there to 8.x was practically impossible. At the time even the SUSE people we had to deal with recommended doing a full reinstall instead, which went faster and broke less stuff.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 23, 2012 14:31 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The devices we're talking about in this thread have all been Google Nexus products, not things locked down by a mobile telephone manufacturer or service provider. As a result the upgrades come at a fairly steady rate from Google.

I bought a Nexus 7 a while ago when I realised I would be without any of my computers for several days it has seen occasional use ever since. A while ago I heard about Android 4.2, and within a week of that a dialog popped up. Did I want to upgrade now, or would I prefer to do so in my own time? I was busy, so I picked later, and some hours later I remembered the offer, checked the relevant Settings page and updated.

One reboot later I was running Android 4.2. It was seamless, all my settings were left alone, everything was as I had left it, but now I had new features. One of the 3rd party apps I had broke due to some infelicity or other, it got an update later that week which fixed the incompatibility with 4.2, I would say that it was very like upgrading Fedora, except much faster and less scary.