One would thing that such an universal interface would quickly become a standard offering in airports, hotels, libraries, conferences, etc.
My favorite computing peripheral form factor has always been the PCMCIA card.
It seems to me that you could fit a minimum viable phone inside a PCMCIA card and then insert that PCMCIA card into a normal sized laptop when you choose.
The laptop would have no CPU/RAM - it's just a big USB keyboard and monitor - and the phone would probably have limited battery life, given the size (although you could bump out the non-port end of the PCMCIA card with some extra battery, the same way that wifi cards had an antenna bump ...)
Something like this was proposed ... there was some minor project where they had built an entire PC (not a phone) into a PCMCIA card (although with different pin-outs) and proposed using it as a portable "guts" for any laptop "host" but I can't find the URL for that project anymore ...
I certainly would welcome a phone the size of a pc-card and a cable-less docking of the brain into the host laptop would be much better than either 2-3 USB cables or some weird, proprietary phone dock ...
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pcb...
People keep building phone dock systems and they just don't really seem to take off. Maybe the best one available today is the HP Elite X3 .. running the discontinued Windows Phone.
I was able to plug my phone in at the last hotel I stayed in because its ageing 30-pin dock also had an aux plug, which my modern phone still supported. It also seemed a lot better for my device security to not give some random active device direct access to my phone.
You get a set amount of data per month, for instance 20GB. Why should they care at all what you decide to use that data for?
The way to get around that is supporting such kind of project (like fairphone, ubuntu mobile, linux on samsung) and gaining a true majority in the user base. However that is unlikely since for most people it's good enough to just run instagram, whatsapp and spotify. And for that the OS really doesn't matter.
*edit: I thought about something one can do also. Not an expert about these, but these very flat laptops like macbook air, I think they are underneath the keyboard also a smartphone/tablet. Buying these may increase the desire to create smaller and smaller computers. If what is labelled "computer" gets as small as a smart-phone that's also fine for our usecase, but it may be easier to digest for marketing people of these big corps.
I don't think those two are mutually exclusive.
but then everyone got hung up on emulating Apple's dock plug, and things went backwards.
Unfortunately, while quite a few docks are on the market, compatibility is a bit iffy, and rival USB-C alt modes like HDMI and MHL muddy the waters.
I think Apple are the only company that can pull this off right now, everyone else is too fragmented to get the hardware/software integration right, and popular enough for mass adoption.
If they release it they could tigger a whole new era of computing. e.g. Imagine going to work without having to bring a laptop along.
Even mac folks have their Macbooks at least twice as long as their phones.
So i dont see this happening for any kind of professional use anytime soon. But who knows.
Disclaimer: My last phone (downgraded recently, because battery life > 4k screens) is more powerful than my Laptop.
So for us devs it would mostly be for non-work stuff. And then you have the problem that you'd have to carry around external hardware with you or find places that offer it for use.
Phones with 8gb of ram like the Oneplus 5 make this more and more appealing to try out.
It looks like a MacBook Air, but is really just a screen, keyboard, touchpad, and portable battery bank for your Android phone.
Hopefully my Kickstarter pledge pays off!!
I knew there was a catch somewhere. I seriously doubt there's a technical reason why older Galaxy models can't support running Linux as well. I don't understand why it's so difficult for Android manufacturers to allow users to install whatever they want–I bought my phone, now let me install what I want. Sure, void the warrant or refuse to support it, but don't get in my way.
Older ones had micro-USB, so they don't have the hardware needed for DeX.
Smartphones with ARM SOCs aren't like that because they aren't just a CPU, they also include a crapload of additional system components. Even SOCs like the Snapdragon within a specific model will offer many variations to the manufacturers. Outside the SOC itself, phone hardware is far less standardized than on a PC. You can't compile your Linux distro for ARM then install it on any smartphone, the kernel needs to be tailored to the specific phone. That's why even though unlocked Android phones are around it really takes the manufacturer themselves to be able to do something like this because only they have the detailed understanding of the platform and the resources. Otherwise, other people would be doing it.
Given a set of hardware with the same instruction set and drivers with full device tree support, one can now create one kernel for the whole set.
https://www.slashdata.co/blog/2013/05/the-mediatek-phenomeno...
Out of interest, would it be possible to operate an ARM SoC system like a generic x86 system, if drivers were upstreamed? Or is there too much SoC specific code?
Although I agree we should be supportive.
Can you do this (install arbitrary OS, etc.) on any of the google nexus devices ? I have never used one but my impression was that they had totally unlocked boot loaders, etc.
The problem is the hardware is undocumented and the shipped drivers are proprietary so you would need to reverse engineer support for everything from the chipset to the modem to the display adapter.
So you can go throw a Debian Arm image in place of a system partition on many Android phones... it just won't boot.
You've got several choices for running a GNU/Linux container on Android/Linux already: Lil Debi for rooted devices, GNURoot for a full distro on non-rooted devices, and Termux for a quick-to-get-running and reliable CLI distro.
What is the catch? That they've put development effort into supporting newer phones.
No, due to proprietary firmware and drivers you're tied to a specific Linux kernel version.
The reason? When sitting behind my desk at home or office I don't like to be limited with the mobile CPU. I have the required kWhs to power a proper CPU, GPU and run 64GB of memory. I also don't want to run separate computers on each location, because keeping these in sync (OS settings, applications, databases etc) is painful.
Technically we are almost there. We can put reasonably fast flash storage to the phone. USB-C should provide enough bandwidth. On OS software side we would need some work to make plugging in/out convenient. I don't want to do a full reboot every time I "unplug" the phone from desktop processing unit and move it somewhere else. As I move between processing units I would like to keep my apps open, maybe just doing a hibernate/sleep and then waking the system up connected to a different processing unit.
This solution means double spending on CPUs and memory, but desktop hardware is relatively cheap.
It allows ethernet connection over USB.
Once ip network is setup, you can easily run nfs, samba, vnc over that network interface.
A few years back when I worked on AOSP project, I dislike the tools from Android. I put a "ubuntu for arm" rootfs in a subdirectory inside a cell phone platform, chroot to that subdir. I have full ubuntu environment inside a cell phone. xfce4-terminal, ddd, nfs, samba - ~40k ubuntu packages all available with a simple apt-get install command.
As long as you have enough RAM, CPU cores, storage space inside a cell phone, it is very easily to setup.
If you keep the vnc server running, you can plug and unplug that cell phone to any desktops, thin client and your can instantly log back into the same GUI environment.
Even Apple, being in the forefront of USB C connectivity, is vastly lacking in robust USB C operations. Plug in/out of usbc cables causes dramatically high crash rate on the new MBPs
How do you expect this to work? You can’t hibernate an OS and swap out all the hardware and expect it to actually wake back up. You’re going to have to do a full boot.
/hibernate/machine/5c76f5e0-9117-4e33-8093-9de2e2f1b6de
/hibernate/machine/d755fe2c-2b13-4436-8a5b-ba3363b9c642
With a sophisticated enough setup, you could probably even dual-install binaries (although this would be much involved with ELF where you must have separate binaries compared to something like Mach-O) to something like /usr/bin_x86_64/ and /usr/bin_arm64/ and then use your shell to select your path. This might work on a system level, but would certainly work on a per-install basis manually.
Have you actually tried? You sound like you're used to Windows where if you change a single piece of hardware the whole OS goes to pieces and needs to be re-installed or go through a painful process of driver searching. Considering I can (and have) literally moved hard drives between vastly different generation machines (granted, they were the same architecture), I don't think it's that far fetched to imagine Linux might actually resume from a hibernate with no issues on different machines. I've got some spare time this weekend, and I might just have to test this theory. Even if it doesn't work out, my experience with swapping hardware in Linux leads me to believe it wouldn't be that hard to add support for resuming from hibernate on different hardware. Sounds like a good college senior CS project to me.
Basically it presents ISOs over the USB connection as if they were storage devices, allowing them to act as boot media for a connected PC.
Sounds rather nice, especially considering I've been installing various systems over the last few days and flashing images to a thumb drive gets old really fast.
Thanks for mentioning this, it'll probably save me a few hours in the future!
Termux provides a recompiled debian distro which runs as a android App. It doesn't chroot or need root and it works amazingly well. No desktop apps though.
It's specially useful on chromeos
I absolutely love having my dev work on my phone, being able to hack away or do code review for 5 minutes wherever is incredible.
At home using a chrome-cast and have it on a big screen.
It would be nice to have a window manager I suppose - but i'll probably end up in a full screen terminal anywya.
When mobile the biggest problem for me is just plain old screen size - I'm tempted to get a cheap Chinese tablet and use it as a remote screen somehow - leaving my phone in my pocket.
Does anybody know where I can buy such a device or why it is not yet available?
It's in most Android phones. Many TVs support it, or you can buy an adapter.
It's cheap enough so that when it inevitably breaks I won't be too concerned. It fits in the back pocket of my jeans too which is handy.
Jokes aside, I can see how this would be useful for sysadmin and devs - bring along your smartphone and you're set - but this would never fly for a general, even if geeky, public. Very nice approach though, curious to see where this ends up going.
> this would never
From experience, I now pause and consider twice any statement I make using never. You know, I thought Facebook would never become dominant using such a one-size-fits-all interface where I can't even choose a theme or even my color, let alone which elements to be displayed and in which order (I keep thinking their UI is ugly to this day, if this was our 'home' it feels it looks like a housing project on internet to me). Or back in 2010 when I bought an iPhone 4 and later an iPad 2, I thought Apple would never keep iOS so dumbed down compared to OSX (e.g. "Smart" features, a great first step into intuitive automation, the real graal of computers imho, lest one thinks it's OK to become a robot and click/tap thirty times to perform thirty times the same operation).
So... yeah, I don't know. Everything says you're right today, but with just the right tools/apps, a good Linux distro tailored to popular phones could reach the same level of popularity than, say, iPhones (currently ~10% of the market, roughly one in ten Android phones).
Personally i see this more as a marketing thing from Samsung than anything else.
I'm quite eager to get away from android
In the meantime however anyone who wants to use Linux on their phone today should check out https://ubports.com/
It works now!
I'm opting for a Pixel 2 and an iPhone X for work and personal. They're expensive at first, but way cheaper and far more convenient in the long run. They always have immediate security updates, and they update their OS for atleast 3 years. Korean phones are rip offs, they barely update at all. Every single one of my Korean phones are still waiting for security updates. It costs way more to own a Samsung or LG phone in the long run.
Don't buy Samsung or LG phones.
The Pixel 2 and iPhone 8 are as Korean as a Kia. Surely you should not buy them, since they contain that pesky Korean commoditized OLED technology.
I'm not a gnu zealot. I think rms has many faults. But a major company saying "now you can run Linux on android" or "now you can run Linux on Windows subsystem for Linux" is beyond stupid.
In the case of Samsung it's Like saying you can make a sandwich out of a sandwich. In the case of Microsoft it's like saying you can make a real roast chicken out of a soy chicken.
The number of things I've spent decades thinking "wow, rms/they're borderline crazy" only to end up with "oh okay, they had a point" is kind of humbling. DRM, encryption, naming, ...
Yet I'm still not in agreement with the GPL and keep thinking MIT or BSD are better. Maybe only to be proved wrong again in the future.
Nobody just runs Linux + the gnu environment compiled from source themselves. People use a distribution, which has a name.
The problem is Microsoft's phrasing. They're calling the distros (eg ubuntu or suse) that can run on WSL sans Linux (as they use the NT kernel w/WSL) "Linux".
https://twitter.com/TechBandCamp/status/920733089948504064
It's like saying "for our lactose intolerant customers we sell cheeseburgers without cheese".
This should be Linux for Galaxy right?
I have nothing against Android. I would like to choose who creates the OS used on my smartphone
Unfortunately it will never be that simple. First, the distro you want would need to have an ARM port targeting the same version of ARM SoC in the phone. ARM isn't like x86 with just two targets (32 bit and 64 bit), it's a quagmire.
Second, your distro of choice would need to stick with the exact kernel version used by the phone, and I guarantee if you take any three Android phones by three different manufacturers made in the past two years, you'll see three different kernel versions, each with tweaks made just for that device. Said tweaks would make it impossible to have a distro targeting all three devices even if they did have the exact same kernel version.
Third, your distro maintainer would need to own or have access to every Android device she wished to target, and while that works for a community driven project like Lineage OS, it's not realistic for the lone Linux distro developer or small team who wants to add phones as targets for their existing desktop class distro.
Would this apply for the new Purism phone? i.e. if all the drivers are upstreamed into the mainline kernel, does thstnot mean you can use any kernel past the point where the drivers are included, without modification?
People say this a lot but that's not my experience. I have a lot of ARM machines and move binaries and complete distros (sans kernel) between them all the time without recompiling. Everything after ARMv7 is pretty well behaved.
Android doesn't expose a proper Linux to userspace and Google has been clapping down what we are allowed to do with the NDK since Android 7.0 (edit: corrected, only started in 7.0).
So playing "what if", you can replace Linux with something else that is compatible the NDK APIs and no one would notice, other than the OEMs.
Would you have a link to more details/reading on this? I wasn't aware.
Makes sense. That way there isn't a massive stockpile of old useless Android devices when the "new Google OS" comes out.
What this "Linux on Galaxy" thing will provide on top of Termux is X (or Wayland?) and probably a bigger selection of software.
Nowadays I simply use JuiceSSH and mosh to connect to my main computer. I would like to have Emacs in my smartphone even while I don't have mobile signal though.
I really loved the idea of it. You had the whole Android / Java / Bionic runtime sharing the same kernel as your GNU stuff. They had a way that you could even access your Android stuff from within your desktop environment like apps, contacts, text messages, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_for_Android
It worked on Galaxy S4, and Samsung were really close to shipping it on every S4. It never did ship though, and the project was abandoned. A couple of people who worked on it tried to push for open sourcing it, but I don't think it ever was open sourced.
You could hook it up to an external monitor with an MHL-HDMI cable. Of course the SoC wasn't as beefy as ones we have now, but it was pretty OK.
Imho its miles ahead of the other watch OSes
Tizen already went through these reboots:
1 - Replaced Meego SDK with Bada OS SDK
2 - Replaced Bada OS SDK with EFL + C++ SDK
3 - Dropped C++ SDK and replaced a new pure C API alongside EFL
4 - Currently adopting .NET Core + Xamarin.Forms
Then there is the whole issue of code quality.
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/12/samsungs_tizen_no_l...
I mean, I can understand subscribing in order to get a beta or pre-release, but if right now nothing is available and when it will be available it will be public, it seems to me nothing more than a personal data collection.
When it will be public there will also be a lot of publicity about it, so it's not likely that one needs to be notified.
Sure, but I wasn't expressing a doubt on why Samsung put that on, I was doubting why an end user would want to give away his/her name/email/company, substantially in exchange of nothing.
I think it would be awesome and amazing if I was completely wrong about all of that, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd rather wait for the Pyra to release and carry two devices than torture myself with an impossible dream.
> Not super practical in terms of battery life
Samsung avoided this problem by requiring that the phone is connected to the dock that is also charging it.
Here's a tip: don't mess with my scrolling.
I think there's some serious room back in the mobile market with the way these devices are going. Outrageously expensive disposables aren't sustainable forever. At some point people get tired of throwing $500 in the bin for the exact same thing they had last year, just so they can have a full day worth of battery charge again.
for starters - don't throw away the phone - throw away the crapps - FB, WA, IG, Twitter, SC, ...
Or is that not how this works?
On the other hand, if Windows 98 is enough for you, you can run it on your phone right now: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
That site is doing the CPU emulation in JavaScript(!). It's fast enough because, well, it's Windows 98.
It is regular Debian (full repository of unmodified packages unlike Termux), and unlike variety of other chroot based solutions it doesn't require root access (utilizes proot).
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gnuroot.de...
I run on it Nginx + PHP, OpenVPN, Samba, SSH, MiniDLNA, a git private server, AvaHi, python scripts...
To get extra memory (not that I need it) I turn off the android UI and to save power I turn off the LCD.
ping me if you want to know more!
The reason we have high quality free software for desktops is that you can easily install anything you want on your laptops and PC's.
Significance of this is that it allows free software stacks to be built for phones.
Kudos to Samsung for such move. Let's hope other phone makers also open up the phones.
(right?)
