Android and Ubuntu

[Revmacd]

I just did an HP laptop over in an Ubuntu Linux OS. It's been probably two or three years since I used Ubuntu as my desktop OS and was stunned by the leaps forward they've made. It had support for all the machine's peripherals right from the boot disk. I'm not trying to spam about Ubuntu but it was a gorgeous OS when I was done.

 

I bring it up here because when I was going through the process of downloading the distro and weighing my boot options I was on the Ubuntu site and I came across this. It seems they are trying to fuse a desktop environment with a mobile environment. I think they are accomplishing this by stepping down the complex instructional set to a reduced compiler that will work with mobile processors but still keeping the look and feel of the full Linux distro. It was pretty lightweight to begin with.

 

So the purpose of the post I suppose, is not to ask if it could be done, as clearly they are doing it. I am asking if it should be done. I love open source stuff, of which both android and ubuntu are prominent members of the family. I don't know is I need Ubuntu on my phone any more than I would need android on my desktop though. I love both OSes in their own respective realms. I would love a decent excuse to bring them both together, perhaps on my transformer tablet as it is halfway between a phone and a laptop already anyway. I just need a compelling reason why and can't seem to think of one. How would this be a benefit?

 

Thoughts?

[bdfull3r]

I love linux software and Ubuntu is definitely one of the better distros.

 

And as it turns out, you are not alone. The guys over at Canonical (Ubuntu creators) thought the same thing.

 

The prospect of that video incredibly exciting to me. In order to implement this the phone has to come with the software though so its not likely to see too much support. I can't wait until they release this code so the custom ROM community can have it. I could love to hook my Optimus or my Galaxy Tab to a monitor and get Ubuntu

[Revmacd]

That was a great video and I thank you for finding and posting it bd. I've seen the Motorola Atrix at my local Sprint store with the monitor and keyboard dock. Basically it turns the phone into an Android desktop as it works now, but again Android is a mobile platform. Now with the Ubuntu you can get a desktop environment as well. That is great. I would love to see it available for all Android phones with a dual core processor though. The Atrix was specifically designed to be docked like that.

 

The advantages are huge. Your home desktop computer goes with you everywhere. Forget about being able to connect to your home computer, you'll have it right there. If it caught on and a lot of people adopted this method, you could conceivably be able to ask your friend at his house, or your colleague at his office, if you could borrow his dock for a moment to show presentations or anything else. It would be devastating to the desktop pc manufacturers but the phone makers would double sales overnight.

 

My worry is that now that Microsoft has jumped into the mobile market, and also shown they have the willingness and ability to throw their hardware partners under the bus, that they may well pour their considerable resources into a similar scheme and be able to complete it first. I do think this fusion of mobile and desktop computing is the wave of the future though.

 

Again, thanks for the video bd. The other related videos that came up on the page will keep me busy for some time as well.

[matthewdroid023]

Canonical introduced a hybrid Android phone/computer running Ubuntu at a mobile phone confab.

[Revmacd]

I think we can safely say that the next ten years are going to be a slugfest of innovation as each of the big players in the computing world try to out shine each other in the cross platform market.

[bdfull3r]

I think we can safely say that the next ten years are going to be a slugfest of innovation as each of the big players in the computing world try to out shine each other in the cross platform market.

 

we are seeing that now. In computers MIcrosoft and Apple have never been more competitive. Apple's steady price model has lead to them starting to be competitive in pricing with a lot of PC alternatives like Ultrabooks. A Samsung Series 9 is almost penny for penny tied with the MacBook Air.

 

Smartphone evolution has been nothing but spectacular. Apple re-envisioned the smartphone with the iPhone or at least made it popular. Android is selling at the rate of a million activations a day (many in emerging markets), windows phone is leveraging Nokia to give competitive hardware are rock bottom prices and now Amazon wants to get in on the action. It has NEVER been as big of a buyers market as it has been now. Even with this massive influx on patent lawsuits the progession isn't slowing.

[whitemafia]

I would love to have android phone running ubuntu as mentioned by matthew.

[Revmacd]

Well now I've been back on Ubuntu for more than a month. My HP is a dual boot between the Windows 8 pre-release candidate and Ubuntu 12.04. I am absolutely loving Ubuntu, although I have had trouble trying to get the 3D version so I can enable the Compiz desktop effects with my Nvidia graphics card. I'm not good enough with the command line to manually configure the latest driver but I study it for a while every day and I'm sure I will solve it soon.

 

One of the reasons I am loving Ubuntu is you can get the Eclipse Development Platform right from the Ubuntu Software Center as well as Java and SDK and all the plug ins you would need to compile an Android distro of your own. I know I'm a long way away from being able to do that but it seems like the very best platform to learn how to do this stuff. So already my fusion between Ubuntu and Android has shown me the possible up side of it. It's fascinating stuff.