Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)

Posted Mar 25, 2015 13:42 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes) by drag
Parent article: Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)

The fact that I can run a almost-complete Linux desktop with X11 support in Android using chroot'd installs of Debian or Arch Linux with about a half hour of effort goes to show that it's still Linux. It's still all there if you want it. Traditional Linux environments and Android are not mutually exclusive things... just a bit strange and irritating at times.

I do that too. The "X11 support" is misleading -- as far as I can tell, you have two options.

(1) an actual native X server based on SDL, written by a Russian guy with the handle pelya. It works, but it doesn't run as a "service" (unlike many other unix-friendly programs like the most popular terminal emulator) and therefore is liable to be killed by Android randomly, destroying your entire session, unless you live your life in there. I have tried cron-jobs to renice it, reset its oom priority, etc, no luck. I have filed a bug report suggesting it register a "service" to stop itself being killed, no luck. I don't have the skills to fix this myself.

A virtual-framebuffer-based desktop viewed via VNC. It works as long as you don't want any sort of animation. The pluspoint is that apparently unix processes, including the VNC server (I use x11vnc), are not killed by the android OOM killer and not even killed under spontaneous reboots -- I have had my device reboot spontaneously (some ROM bug I suppose) and when I tried to view my desktop it was still there. I do get serious work done that way.

Nevertheless, I think this is only for nerds like you or me -- Google has zero interest in making it better, Ubuntu had an "ubuntu on android" project that died long ago, and Android Marshmallow (or whatever M is called) could easily end up breaking all of it. There is a valid concern here.

Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)

Posted Mar 25, 2015 14:31 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

It's all stuff that can be fixed. And for it to work as well as it does with just one guy from Russia doing it shows the potential of the platform.

Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)

Posted Mar 25, 2015 15:30 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

It's all stuff that can be broken when Google decides to. For example, Google could just stop chroot from working.