[GTALUG] little Android set-top boxes with HDMI in

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Thu Jan 28 14:49:41 UTC 2016


| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca>

| On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 01:44:35PM -0500, Alvin Starr wrote:
| > Nice android box.
| > Well at least you know it will boot and run linux.
| 
| No, you know it will boot and run some android build.  Maybe you can
| even get the source code to the kernel (although tons of these small
| media devices don't give a shit about GPL violations).

As I understand it, Fedora and probably Ubuntu and debian can run on
Linus Kernel releases.

I would have thought that it would be easy to plant a conventional
Linux distro on top of Android's Linux kernels.  That turns out not to
be the case.  It has been tried by Ubuntu with apparently much effort
and limited success.  I don't know what the key problems are.

One issue is video.  Not only are the video interfaces proprietary,
but for Android, no X is needed.  They use something called
SurfaceFlinger.  There have been attempts to layer Wayland or Mir(?)
on top of SurfaceFlinger.


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