Re: Free software for an ARM tablet?
On Sat, 29 May 2010, imm wrote: > I don't have a voice here, but I have spent a while playing with > Moblin (and more recently MeeGo), and also with the Android SDK's. > (Caveat: this was for an experimental platform I have been trying > out; I have actually written exactly 0 useful apps with either > platform...) > > FWIW, then, I'd suggest that MeeGo is a substantially better fit for > Sugar than Android is. I think that this only matters if you have someone who is using Sugar already and you are wanting to make the best Sugar distro. However, there is not a large installed base of Sugar users, so I think that having Sugar available as an option for people to run who are already running Android (substatute any 'poor fit' linux system here) will be a win as it gives people who are already running that system the ability to try Sugar and stick to it if they like it. David Lang > That's just my opinion, of course, and carries no weight, but I felt > I had to say something here; Android seems to have a lot of buzz > around it, but it's not really all that much like a stock linux, in > awkward and irritating ways, and I am not persuaded of it's > "openness"... > > (As for MeeGo, I quite liked Clutter, but it seems to be relegated to > a secondary role now.) > > On the plus side, it does seem that all the "phone" OS vendors are > doing a lot of groundwork to make the Sugar-style "one whole screen > app at a time" approach acceptable to end users. Even the iPad helps > in that regard, I guess.. > > > > > > ___ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Free software for an ARM tablet?
I don't have a voice here, but I have spent a while playing with Moblin (and more recently MeeGo), and also with the Android SDK's. (Caveat: this was for an experimental platform I have been trying out; I have actually written exactly 0 useful apps with either platform...) FWIW, then, I'd suggest that MeeGo is a substantially better fit for Sugar than Android is. That's just my opinion, of course, and carries no weight, but I felt I had to say something here; Android seems to have a lot of buzz around it, but it's not really all that much like a stock linux, in awkward and irritating ways, and I am not persuaded of it's "openness"... (As for MeeGo, I quite liked Clutter, but it seems to be relegated to a secondary role now.) On the plus side, it does seem that all the "phone" OS vendors are doing a lot of groundwork to make the Sugar-style "one whole screen app at a time" approach acceptable to end users. Even the iPad helps in that regard, I guess.. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Free software for an ARM tablet?
If somebody gets Android running on a tablet and that somebody actually honors the GPL, it's likely that much of the work of a "real" Linux port has been done. Except that I've heard from a very credible source that in existing Android *phones* there are 9 pieces of essential yet proprietary software, which they have shoehorned into the GPL kernel by writing a GPL'd dummy driver that lets the real (proprietary) drivers run in user space. One, for example, calibrates the accelerometer, and is considered highly proprietary by the *%&%&## who build the chip. OLPC has dealt with this problem before (honorably), and it would be a real shame for OLPC to give millions of units of chip sales to a company that would do that to its customers and developers. (But: the VIA cpu chip and its companion chip in the XO-1.5 still don't have published specs. Nor the codec chip.) Then you'd have to throw away the deliberately-differently-encoded Android Java runtime and hacked-to-be-incompatible libc and such. But that part isn't much work at all. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
