Are Android tablets "programmable enough" to do open source tasks? They look like media vending machines to me, not quite walled garden like iCrap but focused on entertainment and social media rather than constructing work environments with open source tools.
Over a couple of decades, I have slowly learned how to configure an X86 Linux machine to do a few work tasks - handling text, ssh, tunneling vpn links, writing shell scripts, etc. The tasks I have in mind are: typing notes for later upload to a server, looking at downloaded PDFs and documents. Bonus points if the device can run local copies of Apache and MoinMoin. When wifi or hard wired ethernet(?) is available, surfing the web for information, connecting through an openvpn tunnel to a firewalled internal LAN, ssh'ing into a server for ascii email, printing through CUPS, logging into webapps on the internal LAN. Securely, of course. And since tablets use Android and non-X86 processors, and cross-compiling is too complex for my simple brain, a local copy of the GCC toolchain and related libraries, perhaps Perl and Python. In otherwords, recreating most Linux laptop/desktop capabilities in the Android environment. All FOSS apps, of course. I'm not much of a programmer and rarely tweak code, but routinely look at source to figure out how the heck a poorly-documented app works, or what files it is looking for or spitting out. I'm a "$5 a month for basic cell phone" guy. I don't want to pay $20 a month (which I think of as $2400 per decade) for another wireless service. So I want to be able to run unconnected, connecting when free/cheap wifi is available. Is this realistic, or are tablets different enough that I would need to spend years (at a few hours a month) re-learning how to accomplish these kinds of tasks? Should I just stick to laptops and netbooks? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
