[OT?] Android phones

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:31 PM, S P Arif Sahari Wibowo
<arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Mar 2010, James Knott wrote:
>>
>> While it would be nice if they didn't diverge, it's still open source that
>> has it's /root in Linux.
>
> True, that's probably the most important thing. Furthermore divergence in
> kernel space is less an issue anyway.

I suppose.  It won't affect userspace so much; adverse effects would
be on those trying to establish hardware compatibility between new
sorts of hardware and the platform.

> IMHO a more important issue is the
> original Android's decission to have application stack that entirely
> different than in Linux OS (i.e. GNU/Linux). That mean that many
> applications have to be built specifically for Android; therefore the
> community size of the that application is much smaller than if it can use
> common Linux application.

The size of community may be small now; if the stack gets used more
and more for mobile phones, the population increases, and "iPad-like"
devices would add further still to the population.

What a "common Linux system" means is a mighty elusive thing; in the
'embedded/mobile world' there are four answers that I don't imagine
are what you have in mind:

1.  Android would be one, for sure

2.  BusyBox, and very little more, which is what you frequently see on
storage devices

3.  Maemo (the Nokia platform, using some bits of GNU, originally with
Python+GTk, later biasing to Qt),

4.  Moblin+Maemo is in the process of begetting Meego.

None of these represent places where I'd expect that what you'd call
"Common Linux apps" would necessarily run trivially.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists