Re: [gentoo-dev] desktop experience on smartphone: thoughts and plans against Ubuntu edge

[Arun Raghavan]

On 13 August 2013 10:51, heroxbd <heroxbd@g.o> wrote:
> Dear Fellows,
>
> Canonical is raising money by pushing their concept of Ubuntu for
> Android[1][2]. The idea is to put GNU environment (esp. Ubuntu userland)
> in parallel to Android to drive the external HDMI output with X11
> protocal, so that desktop applications can run on the smartphone.
>
> The idea is cool, but not new. The idea is general to all android
> devices, while Canonical is binding the concept with its own new device.
>
> The project is developed underground by Canonical, so far nothing, not
> to say repository, is available except advertisements and the call for
> people to donate.

There are images available for this, btw, if you want to see how it
works and poke around. I'd seen some repositories, but don't know if
there's enough public to do your own build.

> As a natual consequence of the on-going Google Summer of Code project,
> Gentoo on Android[3], we can run native Gentoo on *all* the Android
> devices. Compiling out an Xorg and output to HDMI has no theoretical
> difficulty. Furthermore, sharing of graphic output with Android (instead
> of a separate HDMI output) can be explored with wayland x11[4].

There are a lot of _hard_ problems here (display, audio, input,
codecs), not to even begin on proper policy integration (your phone is
hooked up, voice call starts, what do you do).

That's not to discourage your effort at all - I think it's great that
you're kicking this off and that there is so much enthusiasm for this.
I look forward to seeing the solutions that emerge to solve all of
these, and am happy to offer to test on a device or two.

Cheers,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
http://arunraghavan.net/
(Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)