
Announcing Ubuntu and Android dual boot developer preview - platz
http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/announcing-ubuntu-and-android-dual-boot-developer-preview/1359
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jbk
Ah, I wish I could port VLC for Ubuntu Phone safely...

But after numerous questions, several mails and IRL contact at tradeshows and
conference, I still don't know if I can access the audio output (Pulse) and
the video output (either Xv or an OpenGL context).

Their developer website is about HTML5, QML and HTML5 Platform access. If you
look closely, you get libcanberra or gstreamer options... But I need lower
access... How do I do that?

~~~
salient
VLC doesn't even seem to be fully ported to Android yet.

~~~
jbk
First, that's not true: almost all features are ported.

Then, Android is quite much more far from a Linux desktop stack than an Ubuntu
phone. It notably has a different (very broken) libc, pthread implementation
and different audio output stack...

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aroch
Well, it is true...if "almost all" the feature but not all of them are ported,
then its not "fully ported".

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jbk
You want DVD and Blu-Ray playback on Android? Or external cameras?

Porting and shipping all features in the default build are 2 very different
things...

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aroch
I'm not saying it makes sense, but the GP is correct that its not a full port.
Also, there are android devices that can take both CD/DVD and eternal cameras,
so it isn't too far fetched

~~~
jbk
Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree here. It's like saying the version
on Windows is not a full port because there are some plugins missing compared
to the Linux version. And vice-versa.

Very little features not possible (mostly because of the OS) can hardly be
considered as "not fully ported" as meant by salient.

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tzury
As a 7 years Ubuntu user, recent releases has been a turn down for me (Desktop
releases are letting me down, servers are keeping their quality so far).

The decisions, choices and the fact I need to work hard to tweak the system to
get it into a sane level of satisfaction is disappointing.

Hence, when Canonical announces devices releases, I wonder if it is not more
of the same?

I still don't have a desktop replacement, but would be happy to find one and
try it on.

What happened to do one thing well principle?

Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx. And it seems
lie since the unity fork, we are just going far off-the-track - and OSx wins.

~~~
pan69
I have recently switched to XUbuntu. I tried it a number of times over the
past few years but never thought much of it, however, since the 13.10 release
it absolutely rocks! This is a screenshot of my desktop:

[http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png](http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png)

The whole GNOME 3 and Unity debacle had me searching for a decent desktop
replacement and I was stuck with Ubuntu 11.04 which ran out of support long
ago.. XUbuntu is definitely the desktop distro for me.

~~~
kriro
I run Xubuntu on my netbook and desktop. I just randomly went with it some day
and really like it. I'm not exactly a "power user" and haven't customized a
ton. It does most things the way I want them to be :)

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oelmekki
Can anybody confirm the browser is usable ?

I've tried it a few months ago on my nexus 7, while it was still in alpha, and
it was not usable even on very basic tasks. I can understand that most apps
and features were mocks (that was an alpha after all), but the browser kept on
clicking 10 or 15 px under where I actually clicked (and I suspect it was a
qtwebkit problem from qt5, so that's why I feel concerned : it may not be
fixable directly by ubuntu).

Anyway, I'm glad to see this happen - that's the door for opensource
innovations in the field of mobile. Having a true linux on my mobiles is
something I really want. I also hope they will make the ubuntu sdk portable.
As much as I would love to use and contribute to a mobile ubuntu, I don't want
it on my desktop and laptop (and this kind of limitation is the very reason
why I didn't ever care to look at ios development).

~~~
daker
The browser is still WIP, a lot of pieces are still missing(Content Picker,
Download manager, Private browsing) they will be integrated in the next
months, also the browser will switch to Oxide(based on Chromium Content API).

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01Michael10
Personally, I am waiting (hoping) for SailfishOS to be available to install on
my Nexus 5 which is fully Linux based and has the ability to run Android apps.
Dual-booting on a phone seems clunky to me... Being able to run VMs on Android
would be another better alternative that is in the works (Android 5?).

~~~
deanclatworthy
Have you actually tried it? We have one to play with at work and it's awfully
unintuitive to the point where I gave up trying to learn the gestures. It's
definitely not consumer friendly and requires a large effort even to be able
to do basic tasks.

~~~
dscrd
Are you serious? It took me 10 minutes with my Jolla to get the basic hang of
it and after a day of usage, I don't have to think about how to use the phone
anymore. It's a lot cleaner UX paradigm than any of the competitors'.

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swetland
I'll have to give this a look sometime (though I'll likely hold out until they
have it stable on Nexus 7).

Adding a 540MB swap file is pretty crazy though. I'd rather not have stuff
swapping to the (relatively slow and serialized) eMMC flash.

They could probably look into having the recovery partition kexec their kernel
to chain-load it, rather than replace it entirely. The kernel source is
readily available, as are init and the recovery/updater userspace tools.

I still think the holy grail here is to just run a stock "classic" Linux
userland under Android -- park it in a container, do an
X11/Mir/Wayland/whatever port against the SurfaceFlinger, and make Linux
native apps first class citizens running alongside everything else. No need
for dual-booting or other awkward shuffling about. It'd take some work, but
it's entirely doable.

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archivator
Here's a way of triple-booting Android, Firefox OS and Ubuntu on a Nexus 4:
[http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on-
andr...](http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on-android-
firefox-os-ubuntu-touch/)

It relies on a piece of kernel infrastructure called kexec-hardboot which to
me sounds like black magic - it's like normal kexec but also resets all the
peripherals so that they can be reinit by the new kernel. Magic.

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wslh
Instead of dual booting I prefer some kind of virtualization support to run
the operating systems side by side.

I don't dual boot if I want to run Linux and Windows. Less in a mobile phone!

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ausjke
I don't know why I need dual-boot them, plus I am not comfortable to run
ubuntu on my small screen devices, though I loved it when I used it for linux
development env(and LTS server) on PCs. Now I'm switching back to Debian,
first server, then desktop, somehow I think Ubuntu is stretching too thin and
lost its focus, you can't do everything at the same time, not to mention
ubuntu is still a pretty small company.

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maga
I have a (probably) silly question: does node.js and other x86 compatible
software run on Ubuntu on ARM-based phones/tables? I do not expect them to do
so, but who knows.

node.js and IntelliJ IDEA is probably the only things that keep me on my PC,
otherewise I would replace everything with one android phone.

~~~
nawitus
Did you try Googling? :)

[http://masashi-k.blogspot.fi/2013/08/nodejs-on-
android.html](http://masashi-k.blogspot.fi/2013/08/nodejs-on-android.html)

~~~
maga
Wow, never knew about it (Debian Kit). Thank you!

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11894384/any-web-java-
ide...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11894384/any-web-java-ides-for-the-
arm-architecture-on-linux) \- even Intellij IDEA could be persuaded to run on
Android as it turns out.

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ghoul2
Is there a way to pre-download everything downloaded by the Dual boot
installer app? My connection is too unreliable for a large direct-app download
like this to ever work.

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wyager
Still no Nexus 7 2013 (flo) support for Ubuntu :(

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georgemcbay
Yeah this is very unfortunate for me, personally. I have a Nexus 4 and a Nexus
7 (2013 model) and I'd love to try this out, but the Nexus 4 is my day-to-day
phone and it would be terribly inconvenient to monkey with it so much just to
try out an early Ubuntu release. The Nexus 7 is more of a toy and I'd be
willing to try it out, but they still don't support the newer model of it.

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nashashmi
What's that saying? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

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Tepix
This looks promising, I hope it will be tested on a Galaxy Nexus soon.

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bowmanb
Has anyone tried this on a Moto X?

~~~
01Michael10
It does not look like the Moto X is supported in anyway right now -->
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices#Working_with_phablet-f...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices#Working_with_phablet-
flash)

~~~
bowmanb
Ah, thanks.

