Hi all,
I played with Debian on my Galaxy. See video here and wiki/project here. It is a dual-boot system, but I use android's init to boot Debian, just removing android's services and adding things like 'startx', so you may say it is not a true Debian. It runs matchbox and LXDE.
I got this idea that it is possible to use Android's middleware, i.e. RIL, but run a custom desktop environment on top of it. I was looking at other environments like various openmoko distributions and maemo, but was not particularly impressed by any of them, so this question is open - do we need an alternative pure linux (no java) Debian compatible etc etc distribution for Android-based phone? And if yes, how should it look like?
I tried to write my own dialer application using different kits: GTK+/C, GTK+/Python, QT/C++, QT/Python, but could not make anything particularly worth looking at (I am poor designer anyway). However it seems that making it talk to the RIL daemon is not a big problem. Side note: Python versions occupied 14 Mb of RAM, C version only 7 Mb.
A possible advantages of such a system as I see it:
I played with Debian on my Galaxy. See video here and wiki/project here. It is a dual-boot system, but I use android's init to boot Debian, just removing android's services and adding things like 'startx', so you may say it is not a true Debian. It runs matchbox and LXDE.
I got this idea that it is possible to use Android's middleware, i.e. RIL, but run a custom desktop environment on top of it. I was looking at other environments like various openmoko distributions and maemo, but was not particularly impressed by any of them, so this question is open - do we need an alternative pure linux (no java) Debian compatible etc etc distribution for Android-based phone? And if yes, how should it look like?
I tried to write my own dialer application using different kits: GTK+/C, GTK+/Python, QT/C++, QT/Python, but could not make anything particularly worth looking at (I am poor designer anyway). However it seems that making it talk to the RIL daemon is not a big problem. Side note: Python versions occupied 14 Mb of RAM, C version only 7 Mb.
A possible advantages of such a system as I see it:
- Developing such a thing would let us (the community) have much better control of how things look like and behave on the phone.
- Compatibility between different phone models: we are using middleware/drivers provided by google/manufacturer which may be hardware dependent but our system should be not
- Decreasing dependence on Google, Samsung and others - the middleware/drivers ,I believe, is only a small part of the Andoid compared with the whole dalvik/framework/apps pile. Dalvik/framework/apps, although is open source, is developed by other companies with their own interests, which are not always the same as interests of us, customers and developers. It seems having something community-driven is a good thing.
- We have a freedom to use different programming languages. I find developing in python very fast. Someone may prefer C++ over Java.
- It would be possible to use a lot of open source code.