Submitted by “Naren has been working on a port of Android 4.0 to Raspberry Pi, and as you can see from the screenshots and video below, he’s been making great progress. Hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly for some time; AudioFlinger support is the only major missing piece at the moment.” Not sure how useful it is, but still pretty cool.
Heh! Sure why not.
…I also think this could be an important step towards non-proprietary/open/custom-built/whatever mobile devices and tablets. Right now, a person can put together a PC, but mobile is more important than it’s ever been, and who can put that together? It can be done, but it’s right hard to do. This should help tremendously, even if it’s not immediately beneficial.
Except that the Raspberry Pi requires a binary blob for the GPU.
With enough pressure and a little time, Broadcom may just change their minds on that. I’m still hopeful.
Linux runs on the Raspberry Pi, but that doesn’t make it an open device. In fact it is more closed than your average PC and even more than many Android devices.
Every function or peripheral access needs a modified firmware blob. Only Broadcom can make those, and for some parts (like video decode) you even have to pay licensing fees before they give you a firmware blob that allows their proprietary drivers to perform the desired function.
Don’t get me wrong, the Raspberry Pi is a great educational tool. But it is not open at all.
What working in the enterprise world taught me, is that for most big companies, open source == cost zero.
No one really cares about what is open source all about, except a way to lower project costs, without giving anything back.
Actually, you are now wrong. Linux used to be about low cost. For years that was the number one reason given regarding adoption in the enterprise. For the last couple years, the number one reason is now to prevent vendor lock in.
2011 was also the first year Gartner saw Linux servers outselling Windows. They always had to guess a bit with Linux as many people bought servers and put Linux on after the fact. Now, more Linux servers are being sold with Linux pre-installed than Windows servers.
No I am not.
I work for a big consulting company that usually works with Fortune 500 customers, where the goals of each project are outsourcing plans and ways to lower development costs.
Assuming the customer is ok with the available licenses, open source is usually chosen to lower project costs, not because of quality nor to contribute anything back.
Dead on. Cost is certainly the biggest factor (taking into account all costs, of course, not just licensing). That doesn’t mean those companies won’t contribute back to the community, but it’s not a priority, nor something they’ll do if it costs them too much.
Actually it already happened in a few projects where we patched a few libraries/tools but the changes were never given back to the community.
The reasoning was that if anyone would discover that the company was using open source, it might be forced to open source their products. The fear is present, even when we need to get the company lawyer’s green light to use certain licenses.
While asking for questions in public forums, mailing lists, we are not allowed to use any form of email address or reference that might create a relationship between the open source library/tool and the company that owns the project.
As I said, in the big boys club, open source is free as in “free beer” nothing more.
Absolutely true.
Maybe I’m missing something but how can this help tremendously? You may be overestimating what Rpi’s capabilities. It’s a neat little project platform but it lacks & has drawbacks in many areas. Depending on your usage, it can easily be a terrible choice. What I’ve found is that a lot of people raging about Rpi tend to settle down once they learn what it’s _not_ capable of.
I also don’t see a huge need to build a custom tablet. Tablets generally only focus on a small set of tasks — they are largely just media consumption devices and don’t really benefit from the ability to customize.
Initial Raspberry Pi support was recently committed to NetBSD source tree too
. It is becoming quite interesting machine with lots of open source OSes support. However, is it really interesting to anybody except geeks and will it be the start for other similar solutions? I currently doubt it.
The idea behind the Pi, is that people have a very cheap way to learn how to code, it’s primary aim was for schools so kids had something to learn on/with. Geeks as you say, have already made a big headway and it will leave a lasting mark for other people wanting to learn how to code.
Of course, it doesn’t always have to be linux that it runs and I’m sure there are some nice projects out there that don’t run linux.
I don’t know… I kinda doubt there will be that much of an impact with RPi. Yeah, maybe somewhat by the movement spurred (for whatever reason only when it got such toy…), its guides and such – but nothing really stopped programming stuff before RPi.
And here’s the real kicker: not only it’s more convenient to do this on a laptop, also a) it’s more convenient even when some environment on this laptop simulates RPi b) is there anybody / any school that didn’t have PCs already and got RPi? (so, most likely just adding fairly quickly to electronic junk, with most of them)
Edited 2012-08-11 00:05 UTC
Other similar solutions have existed for years already (eg Beagle Board). Where this device stands out is the price.
Arduinos and the like were already inexpensive, and they had fairly limited impact beyond geek demographics (yeah, “more embedded” in character – but what is the point of general programming, at which RPi seems to largely focus, with such board? Is there anybody with RPi who doesn’t have a PC?)
Edited 2012-08-11 00:10 UTC
I have always been intrigued about getting the full Linux desktop to run on Android (so you get the best of both worlds on an Android tablet device just by adding a proper keyboard and mouse)
Reading the post they say they are working to use the same kernel for both Android and the Linux desktop. The next step would be for both systems to use same graphics stack. So for example would it be possible to port xfce to Android and finally get rid of X completely. I know there is work underway to replace the outdated X windows with something more modern and efficient — could that replacement be the Android graphics stack?
Why, I can hear you all asking — well wouldn’t it be great to have the best of both worlds on _one_ device? Why carry a laptop and a tablet when everything could run on one device. Imagine plugging your phone into an HDMI screen, attaching a proper keyboard and mouse and then starting the Linux desktop.
You’ve basically asked for Wayland [yes, Wayland runs on Android too], then asked for something like Ubuntu For Android. Seriously you neeed to read some news bro, these things are happening now.