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Except you can't really run Linux apps on it easily, since most of them will want X, or at least the GNU libc--and Android has neither. It's a pain in the ass.
by jff 15y ago
Except you can't really run Linux apps on it easily, since most of them will want X, or at least the GNU libc--and Android has neither. It's a pain in the ass.
- notatoad 15y agoit goes both ways - if you put linux on it, it doesn't have dalvik or whatever it is that android apps need to run. not everybody wants to run X apps, what's a pain in the ass for you is a great feature for somebody else.
- jff 15y agoCertainly--but someone buying an Android device thinking "it runs Linux" would probably be disappointed. Linux is there, but from the perspective of the average user it might as well be a custom kernel or even the Windows kernel, because without "surgery" and tweaking, you'll only be running applications built for the Android stack. I've chopped out the Java layers of Android and run my own software on there, but it took some work to get my application running with the Bionic libc and the Android-specific devices.
- njharman 15y agoPeople's perspectives are interesting. For me most Linux apps means command lines and daemons. X is rarely wanted ;) but yeah GNU libc and rest of shell "runtime" I would be very sad without.