Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian) [LWN.net]

Low end innovation

Posted Aug 22, 2013 16:17 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

Unfortunately, any future alternatives to Android are more likely to come from the low end, as seen in The Innovator's Dilemma. (You know, some day I have to read the whole book.) This may make it more difficult that terminals carry e.g. the GNU userspace tools. OK, nowadays even low-end models have two cores and a lot of RAM, but these tools would take up valuable storage space. After all, a basic Debian console instalation these days takes about 600 MB of hard disk, which is a lot.

For instance, does Firefox OS have the Unix userspace? I fear it doesn't, although it should not be hard to add should the terminal have the space.

Low end innovation

Posted Aug 22, 2013 18:25 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> After all, a basic Debian console instalation these days takes about 600 MB of hard disk, which is a lot.

No it's not really. A single movie I copy to my phone can often be that big or bigger, depending on how much effort I feel like putting into compressing it.

Low end innovation

Posted Aug 22, 2013 21:41 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

hmm, my server builds of Debian are about half that size (~300MB of disk), and while they are stripped down, there's definitely room to strip significantly more out of them.

Low end innovation

Posted Aug 22, 2013 18:34 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (1 responses)

Firefox OS has a Unix-like userspace under Gonk.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Architecture

Low end innovation

Posted Aug 22, 2013 22:57 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

The FirefoxOS userspace is based on Android, but considerably more minimal --- no JVM, no Java frameworks, lots of libraries removed. There's no hope of getting traditional "Linux desktop" apps running on it.

We agree with man_ls that a successful competitor is likely to come from the low end, which is why we've targeted FirefoxOS there. In that market having "real Linux" on the device is an unacceptable burden.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 16:19 UTC (Thu) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (8 responses)

Google apps are not open and I agree. But apart from that what else is stopping you not have the unix experience. Please don't expect your mobile phone to boot into a bash shell. That's the last thing anyone would want in a phone at least.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 17:32 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (3 responses)

> Please don't expect your mobile phone to boot into a bash shell. That's the last thing anyone would want in a phone at least

How can you say that on a site frequented by hard-core Linux developers?

I would MUCH rather have a phone that boots into a bash shell than one that is dependent on Google apps. There would be nothing terrible about typing the equivalent of 'startx' to bring up a frontend on each true power-on; not like I'd need to do that before every call, since normal "off" is just suspend.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 17:54 UTC (Thu) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (2 responses)

That's probably one of the reasons that Linux phones never really was useful to masses until Android came over.

I personally don't favor Google or Canonical but having an alternative like Tizen or Firefox OS is preferable than the clunky unity running on my phone.

Firefox OS definitely have a different idea compared to the other alternatives. Canonical should be trying something like that rather than trying to bring the unity bloat into phone.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 18:09 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

> That's probably one of the reasons that Linux phones never really was useful to masses until Android came over.

Wrong, it was a quirk of business circumstances holding them back. WebOS would have become beloved by the masses if it had Google's power behind it... instead of the dying Palm then the struggling HP. WebOS phones were built on top of normal embedded Linux, i.e. OpenEmbedded, but the "masses" never would have known or cared because it has a very friendly UI.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 21:13 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

whatever happened to tizen? samsung seems to have one phone apparently coming "soon" with tizen, but everything else i hear is that it is actually dead. including intel seems to be the kiss of death for these projects.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 17:36 UTC (Thu) by hirnbrot (guest, #89469) [Link]

Well, what is the unix experience?

Is the unix experience booting into sh, compiling stuff, setting runlevels and chmod'ing the crap out of everything?

Yes, that's not really applicable to phones. Touch keyboards are just too clunky and multi-user support isn't really necessary on a device that's pretty much used by one person.

If we move away from the original unix on to linux (or BSD, I don't really know), however, we'll see some things that the current phones very much do _not_ offer.

A sane upgrading experience for the entire system, for example - Android fucks this up badly, giving the vendor too much control.

A customizable system where the user is free to replace or remove parts - again, Android as it is delivered on phones doesn't do this, giving vendors too much control.

I too owned an N900, and the way you could actually upgrade your system with an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" was magical for as long as it lasted.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 19:25 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Please don't expect your mobile phone to boot into a bash shell. That's the last thing anyone would want in a phone at least.

I don't expect my mobile phone to boot into a bash shell, but I certainly expect to be able to open a bash shell whenever I want. I do this on my N900, in fact. I ported my Remind tool to my phone just because I could, and I routinely run it in a terminal.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 15:14 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Quite. The N900 is great as it has a well-developed phone UI but you can just run plain bash too if you like, or ssh in, and install debs. I can't see myself buying another phone until I get something similar. Ubuntu's efforts seems most likely to produce something along those lines, that I'd really like, but I could live with any of the other 3 if I had to. I can't get very excited about varying UI's. It's the back-end tech like the deb-based tools ecosystem for crossbuilding that gets me excited and causes me to choose platforms.

It does help if a platform achieves wider success as then you get 'apps' too, but that's just icing. The n900 is still great for my purposes, despite a very small (strangled at birth) ecosystem.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 14:30 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

> That's the last thing anyone would want in a phone at least.

"Anyone" -- that's drawing from a large group of people. :)

I would like a phone with a markup-based UI -- and a "phone library" with a nice API -- so that I can add and subtract functionality (especially the later), and change things around as I please. It could be HTML5/Javascript, but it wouldn't have to be.

Devices with touch screen-based UIs are just begging to be reprogrammed...

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 18:17 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (7 responses)

You can have a Unix userland right now with chroot (you have rooted your device, right?)

I am typing this on an Android tablet (Galaxy Note 8) in Firefox running in a Linux chroot (a mix of Debian and Ubuntu). I also have Firefox, and other stuff, installed in Android directly. When I want to type/work in a familiar environment, I use the chroot, when I just want to read, I use the Android software (the chroot doesn't have smooth scrolling etc and is a pain to use without the bluetooth keyboard).

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 21:10 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (1 responses)

would love to see a blog post detailing how you did all this. i'm running only nexus devices so i am not in as bad a position as some android users, but still envious of your setup

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 4:48 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I wrote it up for my older Android tablet, using Gentoo, here. I later switched to Debian, but some packages (like Firefox) are from Ubuntu. Any basic armhf image should work for the chroot.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 2:23 UTC (Fri) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link] (4 responses)

I ran an Ubuntu chroot on a G1 (the first Android phone). It was novel for about 5 minutes.

I have since upgraded phones a few times, and usually run Cyanogenmod (which includes a terminal emulator app), but I never really have found a good use for such an awkward keyboard/screen terminal experience.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 4:51 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Indeed, it makes little sense on a phone, unless you use an external HDMI monitor and bluetooth keyboard/mouse. Which seems to be Shuttleworth's vision. But I'm not even convinced of that: someone who wants to work on the go would prefer a lightweight and inexpensive laptop dock (the combo has to be cheaper and more convenient than separate phone+laptop), rather than hunt for monitors. The convergence that works for me is tablet-laptop: my Note 8 is effectively my laptop now.

I use a local shell even less than I make phone calls

Posted Aug 23, 2013 10:01 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

Likewise, I have a terminal app on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7, and I had one on the previous (CyanogenMod'd) phone I owned too. But I rarely use this feature, even less than I use the ability to make telephone calls.

I'd guess a use a SSH terminal (which has more in common with running Putty on a Windows PC than with local terminal access) about once per week, often for trivial things like checking whether a job ran on a PC at home when I'm out with friends but occasionally to do something more substantial when it just can't wait. But the local terminal window? I just checked, it says I haven't used it for _six months_ on the phone.

If you're worried about Android be worried about vendors who don't want to release working source, about attempts to lock the bootloader so that you can't fix bugs even if you DO have the source, and about binary blobs that run on the CPU, like userspace GPU drivers accessing a Swiss cheese kernel "driver" that basically lets them run wild. Those are worthy worries, with real implications for _users_ as well as developers. Running a Bourne Again Shell on inappropriate devices‡ is a fetish, a distraction at best from what we're really all about.

‡ Yes, I wrote an EN-GB keyboard map for Android, but I didn't write it thinking "Man, I am never going to leave home without a full-size UK keyboard again" but more like "If you've got a real hardware keyboard right there it's kind of stupid if half the keys do the wrong thing".

I use a local shell even less than I make phone calls

Posted Aug 23, 2013 10:05 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it's pretty clear that "running bash" includes more than just the ability to have a shell. It's about being able to a) run arbitrary software if you think it's a good idea b) get some measure of low level access to the system.
Musing about the actual importance of a shell on a phone seems to miss the point.

I use a local shell even less than I make phone calls

Posted Aug 23, 2013 13:21 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Running arbitrary software is something you get everywhere except Apple's walled garden. Even the feature phones run arbitrary software, it's just that the limits of what the phone can do are pretty abrupt. Every feature phone I've seen can run the Java MIDP mOTP software we use as a second factor for authorising people despite probably not one of their vendors specifically envisioned or tested that use.

The measure of low level access comes down to: it runs Linux. If you choose a phone from a good vendor, you will get kernel source that you can hack, and (if you're the sort of person who'd have been able to get Linux working twenty years ago on their PS/2) install that new kernel on your phone, hopefully not bricking it in the process.

The secrecy is a related but separate issue. Linux can send arbitrary bytes to the mysterious command ring buffer on the GPU. But unless you know what those bytes do you likely can't get a picture without running the binary blob. If you want to be able to fix bugs in the 3D drivers then "I want to run bash" is a funny way of saying it.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 22, 2013 19:08 UTC (Thu) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

The real open android alternative is called replicant. Ubuntu et all use android kernel and its closed source drivers, while projects like replicant, freeadreno, limare and so on work on actually making the ecosystem more free.

Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream (Guardian)

Posted Aug 23, 2013 2:48 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Hopefully Sailfish (Jolla) will provide this; it is, after all, more or less the continuation of the N900/N9 legacy.