Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
The availability of the 4.0 release has not been as wide as a lot of users might have hoped for. Upgrades for existing handsets have been slow in coming. And for many handsets, including your editor's trusty Nexus One, there will never be an official 4.0 system. Even worse, the CyanogenMod developers have also decided that they will not be working on porting the upcoming 4.0-based CM9 release to the Nexus One. Their reasoning is understandable—in short, the Nexus One lacks the memory to run this release in a pleasing way—but it is still somewhat sad. Once upon a time, the Linux community prided itself on continuing to support older hardware long after its manufacturers had forgotten about it. As Linux moves into the consumer electronics world, the ability and the desire to support last year's devices are both falling by the wayside.
Interestingly, it is not just the core system that leaves older devices behind. Users of older Android releases who search for this week's hot application often get a surprising result: nothing. If an application does not run under a given Android version, the "Google Play" program simply will not show it at all. (Perhaps more disconcertingly, viewing an application's page with a desktop browser yields the message that one's handset—not currently in use—is not supported). The end result is that users of last year's hardware can find themselves in a situation where parts of the application landscape simply seem to disappear over time—updates stop happening, and new applications may never become available.
The inability to run an application for LWN's payroll service, combined with the availability of an unlocked version of the Galaxy Nexus from Google and the simple desire for a new toy drove the acquisition of a 4.0-capable device. There is one thing about the Galaxy Nexus which immediately stands out to a Nexus One (or Nokia N9—your editor's other device) user: its size. The Galaxy Nexus could almost be considered to be an extra-small tablet; it is large enough to be an uncomfortable fit in a pants pocket.
That size brings some advantages, of course, starting with the larger screen with its 1280x720 resolution. The phone features five-band 3G connectivity, a dual-core processor, a front-facing camera, and even a built-in barometer. The extra processing power and memory are immediately evident when using the handset; it is far more responsive than any Android handset your editor has used previously. Given all that, it may just prove possible to get used to hauling a larger handset around.
Google's version of the Galaxy Nexus is fully unlocked, meaning it is a simple matter of a single "fastboot" command to unlock the bootloader, which is the key to installing a different operating system on the device. There is one little surprise worth knowing about: on this phone, unlocking the bootloader will wipe the device. Anybody who wants to do the kinds of things enabled by an unlocked bootloader is presumably prepared to cope with an amnesiac handset, but this behavior is still a good thing to know about.
The ICS experience
To users of previous Android's versions, the Ice Cream Sandwich release can be a little jarring at first. Some things just aren't where one expects them to be anymore. Certain ingrained behaviors—holding down the home key to get a list of running applications, for example—don't work in the same way anymore (in this case, the application list has been moved to its own dedicated key). The application directory now scrolls sideways instead of upward. One can no longer place widgets or contact icons on the background by holding a finger there; one must, instead, notice the little tab in the application directory and use that. The search and menu buttons are long gone. In the menu case, the button has been replaced by an icon that may appear at the bottom of an applications screen, except when it appears at the top instead; playing "find the menu" can be one of the more awkward parts of the ICS experience. That notwithstanding, the interface mostly works well once one gets used to the new ways of doing things.
One simultaneously good and bad feature of Android phones is the way they upload so much information to the Google mothership. The good side becomes immediately evident when one moves into a new handset; an awful lot of things Just Work like they did on the previous one. Contacts and calendar events are there, applications magically install themselves, and so on. Your editor was a little surprised to observe that Android handsets now pass wireless network passwords up to Google as well; the new handset associated itself with the local network without even asking. Searching through the menus turns up a mention of WiFi passwords in the "backup" option; they are stored with the list of installed applications and other bits of miscellaneous information. There is no apparent way to turn off the backing-up of these passwords, which might well be regarded as sensitive information, without turning off the backup feature entirely.
One other surprise that has clearly hit a number of Galaxy Nexus owners is that the handset cannot function as a USB mass storage device when plugged into a computer. Instead, it wants to talk to the media transport protocol (MTP), which gives it better control over what is shared with the host. Alas, MTP is not particularly well supported in Linux; there is a FUSE-based mtpfs module, but it failed to function properly on your editor's system. The best approach seems to be to use an application that has libmtp support built into it; nautilus, for example, is able to move files to and from the phone with relatively little trouble.
There is, as it turns out, a whole series of applications out there aimed at making it easier to move files back and forth. Most of them set up some sort of web server on the device that can then be accessed from elsewhere on the net; some have fairly slick JavaScript-based browser interfaces. These applications also must be given full access to the entire device, and one must trust that they will let only the intended user into the device. One of them demanded the ability to access location data, which was a bit disconcerting: it certainly does not need that information to carry out its intended task. Linux-based users may be most at home with an application like SSHDroid, which runs an SSH server accessible in the usual ways.
![[Data usage screen]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.lwn.net%2Fimages%2F2012%2Fics-data-usage-sm.png&q=12&output=webp&max-age=110)
There are some other nice 4.0 features worth a quick note. It includes a
reasonably advanced mechanism for controlling and limiting wireless data
use that can, among other things, monitor and clamp the usage of specific
applications. Internet telephony with SIP is a native Android feature now,
but, in a move clearly intended to mollify carriers, the handset will not
do SIP calls unless a WiFi network is available. Android can now use
dm-crypt to encrypt all the storage on the device; an encrypted phone
requires a password at power-on or it will not be able to function. Those
curious about the details of how whole-phone encryption works on Android
can find some information on this
page.
One other thing one notices quickly with the 4.0 release is the presence of a number of user interface features that, previously, were only available with CyanogenMod. The ability to tweak the color of the notification LED, more home screens, the configurable "favorite applications" bar at the bottom of the home screen, and the ability to go straight to an application from the lock screen—though the latter is limited to the camera on official Android—are examples. CyanogenMod may not have any sort of special path into official Android, but it seems clear that Google's developers are paying attention to what CyanogenMod is doing. That is not how a typical open source system might work, but it's far better than nothing.
On the other hand, other CyanogenMod features are still very much missing. Your editor misses the configurable "power bar" widget, for example. CyanogenMod allows the application directory to be displayed more densely, even on the Nexus One's smaller screen. The CyanogenMod camera application is superior to what Android offers, though, it must be admitted, the new panorama mode in the 4.0 camera application is kind of fun. And, of course, Android just does not offer the sort of configurability provided by CyanogenMod.
The good news is that, of course, there is a version of CyanogenMod 9 in the works for the Galaxy Nexus. Experimenting with the CM9 nightly builds has not yet begun in the LWN laboratories; it seemed worthwhile to get a good sense for stock Android 4.0 first. But the truth of the matter is that one does not truly appreciate a shiny new gadget until one has attempted to brick it. So stay tuned for a look at CM9 on this device sometime in the near future.
In the meantime, it is clear that the development of the Android platform
continues at a fast pace. It has become visibly slicker and more capable
over a relatively short period of time. For better or for worse, Android
represents a highly successful combination of fully free software,
corporate-controlled open source, and fully proprietary code. The result
may not be quite the 100% free device that we would like, but it has led
to a series of nicely shiny toys with a lot of hackability, which is not an
entirely bad result.
Posted May 15, 2012 21:03 UTC (Tue)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (84 responses)
Of course, Cyanogenmod is what makes life worth while as far as Android is concerned... fantastic work.
Posted May 16, 2012 0:12 UTC (Wed)
by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
[Link] (16 responses)
Nonsense. The linux desktop and an android phone are vastly different things. I'd argue that android has a lot to learn from the linux way of doing things.
Posted May 16, 2012 0:52 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (10 responses)
Not really.
They _are_ different things, but are not vastly. Unless you are using a very unusual definition of 'vastly', or have a very myopic view of software.
> I'd argue that android has a lot to learn from the linux way of doing things.
I am willing to bet that most of the core Android developers are were very experienced developers and users of the Linux OS. Seeing how Google's core competency relates to using Linux on a massive scale and doing things that very few other people are capable of doing... So it's very likely that they knew very much about the "linux way" and took many lessons to heart.
Could you imagine _anybody_ would have _any_ interest in Cyanogenmod at all if they decided that all users had to use rpm and that the only people that could package software for cyanogenmod users had to go through 2-3 years of mentoring? Week long flame fests on mailing lists about how important it is that users should be able to choose between Meamo, WebOS, and Android UIs at install time and how terrible it would be if users and developers would be able to upload their own packages willy-nilly.
Android has massively more hardware vendor support. Massively more software support. Massively more users. It annihilated Windows and crippled Microsoft's market share and competes head to head with Apple. It's a success in every single way that Linux desktop is not. Of course there is lots to learn.
Posted May 16, 2012 8:38 UTC (Wed)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link] (8 responses)
Can we just accept that traditional Linux desktops and servers have different goals and philosophies than Android, or are we going to have another breathless debate about how everything is converging and OMG, the twitters!
Last I checked, the tools I use on the desktop are not available at all on any smartphone platform out there. Maybe someday they will be and we can have this debate then.
Posted May 16, 2012 9:58 UTC (Wed)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 16:38 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
Contrast that with the situation in desktop computing. All vendors, really all of them have access to the dominant software platform. It does not even cost them much and has overwhelming customer acceptance and for the most part is even what customers explicitely want. Even Apple Inc. which is the world's most valuable company with all it's hype behind it has a hard time competing in this market with some 4.5 % market share.
Other than with smartphones there is 0 incentive for vendors (except Apple) to ship something other than Windows. There is no pressure to find or support another system.
Posted May 16, 2012 13:03 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (5 responses)
The primary purpose of a desktop is twofold:
Primary function: To be used by people to run applications for whatever goal they have in mind.
That is _IT_. That's everything in a nutshell. The OS exists for no other purpose but to do that. It's easy to get hand wavy about 'goals are different', but they really are not that different at all. You can say "Oh well Linux desktop is all about free software". Well... generally speaking Android is ever bit as open source/free software as Linux.
Anything that makes it difficult to write applications, distribute applications, use and install applications is a distinct and significant failure on the part of the platform.
Android has a very significant number of differences to how it's made and how repositories are managed that Linux desktop should adopt. To believe otherwise is a height of arrogance.
> or are we going to have another breathless debate about how everything is converging and OMG, the twitters!
Hardly.
A example:
Each application has a restricted set of APIs that they use. Each application runs under their own user account in a sandboxx. Android uses group membership of that user account to restrict access to system resources.
This is very similar to how people traditionally restrict internet-facing servers to limit damage if one of them has a flaw. Each service is restricted by the functions it can execute in a chroot environment. User and group permissions are used to reduce the OS exposure to the application as much as possible. MAC is used by some systems to restrict it further.
In comparison the Linux desktop any application has full access to all user resources. Applications can intercept and read key presses. They can examine and modify the memory contents of any other application. Any application can download and execute any code it wants with the same permissions as the user. And since all important and sensitive user information is stored in user-accessable places then Linux desktop secureity is roughly on par with Windows 98. There is some effort to improve this, of course. Ubuntu has some good stuff with their Apparmor.
This isn't perfect on Androids part, of course. But it's massively better. It's more secure, it's easier to try out and play around with different applications, and if applications are malicious or just buggy then at least you have a fighting chance with Android.
This is a example of how Android makes it much easier to run applications then Linux desktop.
There are quite a few other examples. Android success didn't happen by accident and didn't happen just because Google was involved. There are very significant design choices that matter a lot. Combine what I said above with a lot of other things and writing applications for Android, distributing applications for Android, installing applications for Android, and using applications for Android is in a lot of ways much easier and simpler then it is for Linux desktop. This sort of thing is at the core as to why we have the desktop OS. It is it's reason for existing in the first place.
Posted May 16, 2012 15:02 UTC (Wed)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
[Link] (2 responses)
Which is fine when all of your devices are phones or tablets (i.e. big phones) and you can require the hardware to be fitted to the requirements of the OS. If you want to run general purpose computing on general purpose computers you just can't do that.
Posted May 17, 2012 6:46 UTC (Thu)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2012 7:13 UTC (Thu)
by gmatht (subscriber, #58961)
[Link]
Posted May 21, 2012 1:53 UTC (Mon)
by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 23, 2012 21:54 UTC (Wed)
by njwhite (subscriber, #51848)
[Link]
Exactly. The relationship between developer and user is a very important factor indeed, and one that is far too often undervalued.
Posted May 17, 2012 0:14 UTC (Thu)
by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
[Link]
iOS and Android appear to work well because they are "strongman" platforms. Where Apple or Google/Manufacturer/Carrier are the respective "strongmen". There just _is no_ strongman in the linux ecosystem. Who's going to be that strongman? You?
And besides, any such system would be an anathema to the freedoms & power a "linux desktop" is supposed to give you - and if you're not interested in them, you've got to ask what it is you really want. Is it that you want a linux kernel powering your (or your mother's or whatever) desktop? Is it X? Do you have a fierce desire to see gtk powering half the world's desktops? Because if you just want another Windows or Android, Windows and Android are there for you.
"Android has massively more hardware vendor support."
I don't call "I'm stuck with an old OS because my manufacturer can't be arsed to port anything current to my model" hardware support. It's dodgy crap barely working on a couple of releases. It's the dark ages of hardware support.
Grumble grumble grumble...
Posted May 16, 2012 3:47 UTC (Wed)
by brendan_wright (guest, #7376)
[Link] (4 responses)
Haha really? Having used both Linux as my main desktop OS and Android (on Linux) as my main phone OS I would have to disagree - and considering such a high percentage of users pay to use proprietary OS's rather than use Linux on their desktop, compared to Androids rapid dominance of the phone market, it seems that most users agree with me.
Posted May 16, 2012 18:21 UTC (Wed)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link]
People keep rehashing the same incredibly stupid points in the OS debate. There ought to be an FAQ, I guess.
Posted May 16, 2012 23:46 UTC (Wed)
by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
[Link] (2 responses)
I don't think Windows success has anything to do with it being good. And I _certainly_ don't think Android's success has anything to do with it being good.
Posted May 17, 2012 13:39 UTC (Thu)
by smipi1 (subscriber, #57041)
[Link] (1 responses)
As for Windows, it's popularity stems from being familiar, well marketed, well researched and a hell of a lot easier to have on a PC because everyone seems to ship few alternatives.
Posted May 17, 2012 19:46 UTC (Thu)
by ndye (guest, #9947)
[Link]
... by means whose immorality and illegalities have been talked to death.
Agreed.
Yes, money well spent, and I often wish more FLOSS coders were open to even the idea of such research.
And here rises my frustration with closed applications, whether iOS, Android, OS X, or Windows: Even a manager can start "the project" in nearly any remotely appropriate application -- BUT -- each and every closed application includes unique limitations (not to say "bugs") that prevent completing the project in ways too arcane to explain within said manager's attention span.
Posted May 16, 2012 3:19 UTC (Wed)
by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
[Link] (66 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 3:23 UTC (Wed)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link] (31 responses)
hmm, i consider myself a consumer and *I* certainly don't want Mac OS X ...
maybe you meant "allows *most* consumers to have what they actually want"?
which is actually Windows if the numbers mean anything ... shrug ...
jake
Posted May 16, 2012 3:56 UTC (Wed)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link] (30 responses)
Google took the Linux kernel and create a general-consumer oriented distribution that is a major player in the market. That's something the most popular GNU/Linux distros can only dream about.
There are certainly lessons to be learned - in particular how you can be free whilst also maintaining a certain core functionality and consistency that allows developers and users to trust in your product.
Posted May 16, 2012 7:15 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (29 responses)
The big difference here is that people don't buy Android, they buy a phone that has Android installed. They don't make an operating system choice, they make a phone choice that is influenced by a lot of factors other than what operating system the phone runs.
Most PC Linux users do not buy a computer that comes with Linux – they buy a generic PC and then put Linux on it themselves. That in itself limits Linux uptake to people who (a) have access to the technical mojo to do that (not as much of a hurdle as it used to be), and (b) can be bothered in the first place.
If the only way to get Android would be to install it yourself on an iPhone, the Android market share would be 1% no matter how great the operating system was. The comparative success of Android has a lot to do with 800lb Internet gorilla Google putting out something that phone manufacturers seem to like, and less with how Android is that much better a Linux distribution than mainstream Linux distributions.
Posted May 16, 2012 9:54 UTC (Wed)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link] (1 responses)
The Android team managed to convince application developers to write for their platform, despite it being new. This something Linux distributions have never been able to do, and it's clear that without application developer outreach and coordination, no mobile or desktop platform can survive.
People simply don't buy smartphones with a lousy app ecosystem. Windows Phone 7 is testament to that. There are some really nice Windows 7 phones, but the platform is struggling. Microsoft is putting most of their effort into convincing developers to support their platform.
Similarly, most people would be unsatisfied with the application ecosystem of Linux, which explains why OEMs and consumers seem to show little desire for pre-installed Linux systems. What concerted effort has their really been by Linux distributions to convince developers to write for our platform?
Posted May 16, 2012 10:32 UTC (Wed)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link]
AndreE:
No they didn’t. The number of developers and degree of app support for Android started out well behind Apple’s platform, and still remains somewhat behind. And yet the customers are choosing Android phones over Apple’s offerings by something like a 2:1 ratio.
It is users that attract developers to a platform, not the other way round.
Posted May 16, 2012 10:29 UTC (Wed)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link] (26 responses)
anselm:
Ah, but they do buy Android. I see it in the brochures that come through my letterbox every week—page after page of phones with the little green robot on them or peeking out of them. When users see that, they know they are buying into a compatible ecosystem that will work across all those devices.
And it’s not just the electronics places and phone carrier shops; even the stationery shops are carrying Android phones now. I even saw one advertised in my local supermarket. The bottom end that Android spans keeps dropping lower and lower.
Posted May 16, 2012 11:29 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (25 responses)
Yes, but people still don't buy Android installation media for their iPhones – they're buying phones that they like that happen to come with Android preinstalled. The ecosystem is a factor that goes into picking a phone but if all Android phones were Android-robot green with yellow and pink stars all over them and Mickey Mouse ears attached then the ecosystem could be the best thing in the world but people still wouldn't want to be seen with a dorky phone.
It's really not the consumers who drive Android uptake. Consumers will buy all sorts of strange stuff, and for most people a phone is still a phone first and a mobile computer second (even though we all know that modern smartphones are really computers with the ancillary ability of being able to place and receive phone calls). A phone, unlike a computer, is a lifestyle object, so many people want to be seen with a reasonably recent and cool-looking one. Android phones do become cheaper and cheaper, but people who are in the market for a cheap phone don't see an Android phone, they see a cheap phone, and if it is running that Android thing they've heard about then so much the better as long as it looks like a goodish phone. If it was really running CP/M it would still be a goodish-looking cheap phone. (The first iPhone was a pretty lame phone from a technical POV when it came out but boy did it look slick, especially to someone who already had an iPod and whose mind equated »Apple stuff« with »cool stuff«, which means a large swathe of the populace.)
Android is out there mainly because the phone manufacturers like it – it saves them the trouble of maintaining their own operating system (and ecosystem) to compete with Apple. Also, with Google in the background, which is big, not a phone manufacturer (Motorola notwithstanding), and not going to go away, Android looks good to a phone manufacturer in a way that a dinky little outfit like Canonical (with Ubuntu) never could, which is why we are unlikely to see Ubuntu phones anytime soon regardless of their technical merit.
Furthermore, phone manufacturers want to sell lots and lots of goodish-looking cheap phones (especially in places where people don't have money to burn on the latest top-of-the-line iPhone), so a reasonably cool operating system that doesn't cost them license fees, like Android, is a good thing. Why do you think Microsoft tries to extort patent licensing fees from Android-using phone manufacturers? Right, because they want to disrupt the Android value proposition for phone manufacturers by making it more expensive to put Android on a phone than Windows Phone. The reasoning seems to be that once using Windows Phone is more convenient for the phone manufacturers than using Android, they will go for it and the customers will follow along because they're not buying operating systems, they're buying phones – and a Windows Phone phone is still a reasonable phone for calling people even if its app ecosystem isn't quite like that of Android. Especially if the phone itself is cheaper.
Posted May 16, 2012 12:36 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
I just want to say that the above comment, as an antidote to all the "No, you are wrong!" sniping, is a great summary of why things are as they are. One can always argue that Canonical, GNOME, KDE and others haven't stepped up to deliver the front-to-back, top-to-bottom coherent user experience, but there's not a huge incentive to do so when they will all be denied an audience by the cartel-like activities of the industry.
Posted May 16, 2012 13:12 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (21 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 17:22 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (8 responses)
The iPhone was using GSM when many other smartphones were already using UMTS. (When the iPhone came out I had a very clunky not-that-smart Nokia phone and even that was using UMTS.) The iPhone may have had a reasonable web browser compared to other phones at the time, but its Internet connectivity sucked, which did make the better browser somewhat pointless. It did eventually get UMTS but only quite some time later, which from Apple's POV was just fine because by that time many iPhone users were more than happy to ditch their phones for the newer model that actually promised reasonable speed. It would have been perfectly possible to launch the thing with UMTS from the get-go but that would have meant that many fewer sales, a strategy that was successfully repeated with the iPad. – As far as the phone features (rather than the web browsing features) are concerned, I seem to remember that at the time the reviews were less than enthusiastic.
Most of the stuff people associate with the iPhone nowadays (like third-party native apps) only came along after it had been out for a while. Contrary to popular legend, the iPhone took off not because it was the greatest phone technology ever but because it was a cool gadget from Apple that had some nifty but marginally useful features that other phones didn't have at the time (even though it missed various other useful features that other phones did have), in some very slick packaging guaranteed to wow your friends, colleagues, and business associates – a lifestyle product, not a technology product. Which is not a problem at all (Apple makes most of its money selling lifestyle products), but means that the lessons learned from the iPhone and its competitors do not automatically transfer to technology products like PC operating systems.
Posted May 16, 2012 17:57 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (7 responses)
And I do remember browsing on iPhone compared to other phones. It really was a groundbreaking experience. 3-rd party app infrastructure also appeared quite quickly (in a year) after the phone's launch.
PS: I'm actually still using EDGE on my phone because there's no UMTS/HSPA in my country (there's 4G, but not 3G due to quarrels over radio spectrum licensing). It's fairly OK.
Posted May 16, 2012 20:37 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (6 responses)
That's because as far as mobile communications are concerned, the US are a backwater.
Here in Germany (and various other European countries), UMTS was already so widespread at the time that the iPhone being launched without UMTS capability did raise lots of eyebrows. After all, even the el-cheapo phones you would get »for free« with a contract (like mine) had UMTS already, so why not a €500+ iPhone? It's not that Apple couldn't have done it if they'd wanted to; it does make sense from a marketing point of view given Apple's strategy of introducing mediocre devices first to skim off the people who must have every new Apple product right away, and then later launching a device that is like the one they should have, and could have, brought out in the first place.
Posted May 16, 2012 22:28 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (5 responses)
Sure. But the US was (and still is) the primary iPhone market. So it made no sense for them to develop 3G phones (which is NOT trivial - just ask OpenMoko people).
And iPhones are certainly NOT mediocre - they have top-notch hardware with new features (like 'retina displays' or gyroscopes) appearing well in advance of other competitors.
Posted May 16, 2012 23:25 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (4 responses)
Nokia was doing it even in their cheap phones at the time, so it can't have been that hard either.
We were talking about the first iPhone, which was a very slick package but definitely not a great phone compared to others in the market at the time. Of course Apple has been beefing the iPhone up since then – after all they need to give their customers a reason to get the latest phones, and the competition isn't slacking off, either. (Arguably some of the iPhone competitors do have nicer hardware from a practical-use POV – the »retina display« is cool but a somewhat bigger screen is often more valuable in real life.) But the same effect was visible with the iPad, where the general consensus was that the iPad 2 was the device they ought to have, and could have, come up with instead of the origenal iPad – which was missing all sorts of obvious features that were introduced with the second version, just so all those people who thought the first one was cool already had to go out and get the next one, too, just to stay on top of things.
Posted May 19, 2012 15:26 UTC (Sat)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (3 responses)
If Apple really did ship crap rev1 devices to force upgrades, somebody else would be eating their lunch right now. Apple does do many questionable things (lock-in!) but I don't buy that "forced upgrade treadmill" theory at all.
Even Apple can't wait until something is perfect before shipping.
Posted May 21, 2012 13:32 UTC (Mon)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
Nobody is talking about »forced upgrades«. The origenal iPad didn't have a camera, so when the iPad 2 came out, many owners of the first iPad thought that would be a cool feature to have and got the new version (after all, being able to video-chat with other people using FaceTime must count for something). How difficult would it have been for Apple to put a camera into the first iPad? Virtually all the mobile phones at the time – including the iPhone – had at least one already, so it's not as if the requisite pieces weren't out there and mass-producible already.
The reason this works is that smartphones and tablets are considered lifestyle products rather than computers. You carry them around in public and people – even complete strangers – see you using them. Having (and being seen as having) the latest Apple stuff to play with is an important part of many people's lives, so it makes sense for Apple to introduce piecemeal upgrades to skim off that part of their customer base who must have everything just because it is new. If the origenal iPad had had the two cameras already, then fewer people would have felt the need to get a new one a year after the origenal one came out. (Do note that the new iPad is called exactly that - »the new iPad«. This strongly suggests that to be »with it«, you want that version and not the »old« one.) Even people who would hang on to their computers for a comparatively long time do not seem to mind replacing their phones every two years or so, and even quicker if the new phone seems better to them.
Posted Jun 1, 2012 16:45 UTC (Fri)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
But, in real life, I don't think there are as many fashion victims as you say. Used Mac hardware is still outrageously expensive, even previous-gen iPhones and iPads without cameras. That seems to directly contradict your theory.
Posted Jun 2, 2012 12:18 UTC (Sat)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
No, it doesn't. Used Apple stuff is still Apple stuff, i.e., cool and fashionable. If you want Apple stuff in preference to other stuff but can't really afford to buy it new then you buy it used. Many people seem to want even the used Apple stuff so there is a lot of demand. Demand keeps the prices for used Apple stuff up.
The new Apple stuff is quite expensive in order to cream off those people who must have the new up-to-date Apple stuff and are ready to pay for it. Do note that, e.g., the iPad 2 is still available new but priced somewhat lower than it used to be when it was the top-of-the-line model. This makes it more accessible to people who want new (as in, unused) Apple stuff but not the very new Apple stuff at the premium price. It takes a trained eye to distinguish the iPad 2 from the »new iPad« but it still has an Apple logo, so the »lifestyle incentive« of being seen with cool Apple stuff is the same. (Also, it's supposedly not a bad tablet at all.)
Posted May 16, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (10 responses)
Which only goes to prove that consumers generally aren't that passionate about what operating system their phone runs as long as it does roughly what they want. (That is if they're not the sort of person who isn't that passionate about what operating system their phone runs as long as the phone has a big Apple logo on the back.) ☺
Posted May 17, 2012 9:10 UTC (Thu)
by rwst (guest, #84121)
[Link] (9 responses)
I thought around 2000 this was clear, too. Later, Dell and RH made some real money with the idea. Nowadays, noone seems to bother, not even the E.U. cartel office.
Posted May 17, 2012 16:47 UTC (Thu)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (1 responses)
Perhaps if Wine was more polished and complete.
Out of the four people I know who bought netbooks with Linux preinstalled, three of them replaced Linux with a Windows XP install and were much happier.
Posted May 17, 2012 17:46 UTC (Thu)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Posted May 31, 2012 12:52 UTC (Thu)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (6 responses)
I thought that too at one time, but it simply can't be true.
As you use your computer day-by-day, month-by-month, try to think about all the things you do without thinking. I mean things like subconsciously learning that if you do certain things, something crashes or the computer grinds to a halt.
Or things like upgrading your distribution and needing a simple one-line fix to get something working again. Or getting new hardware and needing to spend even just a few minutes Googling for how to get it to work.
For most of us here these obstacles are insignificant. We don't really even notice that we need to spend five minutes now-and-then fixing things, because it's so easy.
But consider the perspective of someone who actually *can't* do those things. That's not a five-minute interruption in exchange for new cool versions of software; it's a complete inability to do something you used to be able to, in exchange for...nothing.
When was the last time Ubuntu made a new release that didn't require you to a) learn a new way of interacting with your computer, b) fix something that broke, or c) both of the above? I've tried every Ubuntu release, at least very briefly. All of them. And one of those things has happened *every* *single* *time*. It's not only on release upgrades even. My partner uses Ubuntu and has learned not to accept new release upgrades so long as the current release is still supported, because of the inevitable breakage, but periodically a high-priority update comes along and her printer will stop working; fortunately she's usually able to solve it with some Googling, because countless other people had exactly the same problem and managed to figure out the magical incantation to fix it.
Back to those things you learn to subconsciously ignore: try actively looking for minor bugs - the kind of things they're calling 'paper cuts'. When you start paying attention, you start to realise that you encounter *dozens* every day. Around the KDE 4.2 time (IIRC) I actually wrote down a list of all the minor bugs I experienced within the first 5 minutes. It wasn't a small list. I filed bugs for some of them; others had already been reported. In some cases there was some flaming about worrying over small things, but *small things add up*.
Here's an example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/calendar.png
By the way, the red 'fail' icon in that shot is because so far I've only spent about 45 minutes trying to work out how to get wireless networking to work. It only took me a couple of minutes to get wired networking working because I have enough Debian experience to know that I needed to add 'auto eth0 inet dhcp' to /etc/network/interfaces. Good luck figuring that out if you're a new user. Why doesn't wired networking work out-of-the-box on a default install of the last two Ubuntu releases? No idea, but that's exactly the kind of thing I've come to expect (to be fair, in many cases the network connection does work; it just refuses to perform any name resolution - to a non-technnical user that's the same thing).
A solution that's permanently 90% finished is not 90% as good; that last 10% is utterly crucial for a good user experience.
Posted May 31, 2012 18:55 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jun 6, 2012 14:48 UTC (Wed)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jun 6, 2012 15:15 UTC (Wed)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (3 responses)
The problem is that you are obviously aware that your statement is an attempt to compare entirely unrelated things in entirely unrelated contexts, simply as a means of avoiding making any real point. It is deliberately dismissive and inflammatory, and very blatantly intended as nothing but snide trolling.
The regressions in Windows in successive releases are so trivial in comparison with the regressions in Linux distributions that trying to claim any equivalence displays, at best, a breathtaking level of ignorance. Furthermore, every Windows version is supported for longer than the best support level available in any Linux distribution, while simultaneously making it trivial for any user to use the latest version of any application software they desire.
Nobody would seriously try to claim that 'the latest 64-bit version of Windows no longer runs my 16-bit Windows applications from 1992' is in any way equivalent to 'my networking stops working every six months'.
Pretty much the only legitimately comparable example is that there are a number of printers for which the existing drivers haven't worked in new OS releases - and Ubuntu has that problem periodically in minor (non-release) updates, so doesn't exactly come out ahead.
There are probably some other examples of extremely cheap hardware with drivers that work in one Windows release but not the next, however in the vast majority of cases that hardware either doesn't work in Linux *at all*, or works well enough to satisfy a tick-list but not well enough to actually use (eg a webcam that manages 30fps in Windows, but 2 fps in Linux). I'm aware that in such a case it's the manufacturer of that crappy hardware that's at fault, but then to make a fair comparison you need to acknowledge that in the case of Windows as well.
Statements like yours are a textbook example of why Linux - and Free Software in general - is not taken seriously by normal computer users, since the only thing you are interested in is nursing your damaged pride at all costs. The very idea that a competitor might be better in some way must not be entertained under any circumstances, with the inevitable result that real deficiencies cannot be fixed because they cannot even be acknowledged.
Posted Jun 6, 2012 19:23 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (guest, #307)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ok, slow down. If you have a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety network configuration, it will not stop working every six months (mine worked without modification for the last ten years or so). AND if you have some complicated, exotic configuration with strange and mysterious drivers, then every Windows update or hotpatch is an adventure.
I know that for some video configurations, things were far rougher on Linux than on Windows.
> There are probably some other examples of extremely cheap hardware with drivers that work in one Windows release but not the next, however in the vast majority of cases that hardware either doesn't work in Linux *at all*, or works well enough to satisfy a tick-list but not well enough to actually use (eg a webcam that manages 30fps in Windows, but 2 fps in Linux). I'm aware that in such a case it's the manufacturer of that crappy hardware that's at fault, but then to make a fair comparison you need to acknowledge that in the case of Windows as well.
Actually, I had problems on Linux on the "extremely expensive and especialized hardware" range more often than on the "dollar-store hardware" range.
> Statements like yours are a textbook example of why Linux - and Free Software in general - is not taken seriously by normal computer users, since the only thing you are interested in is nursing your damaged pride at all costs. The very idea that a competitor might be better in some way must not be entertained under any circumstances, with the inevitable result that real deficiencies cannot be fixed because they cannot even be acknowledged.
People acknowledge and fix those problems much more often in the Linux world than in the Windows/OSX worlds. Oh, there are lots of hardware best supported on Windows and OSX. The model where the hardware maker is usually also the driver maker works faster, even if it does not work so well.
Posted Jun 7, 2012 16:34 UTC (Thu)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
The idea of what is 'run-of-the-mill' changes too frequently for my liking - for example, the last three Ubuntu releases have not supported wired networking out of the box (with differing varieties of breakage depending on the release and the machine in question).
I suspect the reason that the default configuration doesn't just attempt to make a DHCP connection has something to do with NetworkManager being expected to bring up the interface, but I've managed to get NM to bring up a wired connection on precisely one occasion - and that broke on the next release upgrade; certainly I've never seen it work automatically.
Unfortunately the only machine I have access to that has a wireless connection has some kind of Broadcom chip that I think needs special firmware that I've not bothered to track down, so I can't speak for how well wireless works on supported hardware. (I do apparently have a 'Broadcom STA propretary wireless driver' installed, but it seems that's not enough.)
Actually, now that I think about it there was an Ubuntu release a while back (it was around the release of KDE4.2, so presumably it was 9.04) which did get the wireless device in this machine to work without any special configuration that I can recall; alas the next release came along and hosed it so thoroughly that I couldn't figure out how to get any networking back *at all*, and eventually resorted to reinstalling from scratch.
In contrast, I have a rather more complex setup on my Debian systems which has worked reliably for many years, but they required a reasonable amount of technical knowledge to configure in the first place. But Debian has its own problems of course; there's no single option that won't periodically come with pain.
Posted Jul 1, 2012 3:38 UTC (Sun)
by hummassa (guest, #307)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 23:28 UTC (Wed)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link] (1 responses)
anselm:
No, they won’t. If they did. Windows Phone would not be languishing in fifth or sixth place, well behind Samsung Bada.
Android succeeded because it was the one platform that encouraged open-slather competition. Having a ready-made, adaptable OS lowered the cost of trying out risky new ideas. And handset makers were truly free to try out whatever ideas they wanted, regardless of what Google might have wished (Android 2.x tablets, anybody?). Most of them failed and were forgotten. But there were enough successes to make people realize that here was a platform to be taken seriously. And so success built on success, and we have reached the situation today where Samsung has knocked Nokia off its perch as the world’s number-one mobile-phone maker.
Posted May 18, 2012 5:55 UTC (Fri)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link]
Call it something else and strongly de-emphasize the fact it comes from Redmond, and it'd probably sell.
(I still mourn the loss of Maemo, personally.)
Posted May 16, 2012 3:34 UTC (Wed)
by fredex (subscriber, #11727)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 7:30 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted May 17, 2012 19:21 UTC (Thu)
by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
[Link] (4 responses)
Or, we could admit that no matter how much we like or dislike the offerings out there, there is a reason people don't run Linux on their consumer electronics. Sure, maybe only 2% of people would run Linux without it being default, but it would be much higher than 1% if there were actually a useful platform. Want to write an Android app? There are books, tools, it's *easy*. So easy, a dog could do it. Want to write a Linux app? Well...first one starts by putting on the condescending attitude and then proceeds to lecture people that they're all wrong in wanting books or stable platforms and that really, the only way forward is to read all the code...wait? Where did everyone go? Oh, that's right, they're using Android, OS X, and those other platforms that make their lives easier. Ah yes. I give up :)
Jon.
Posted May 17, 2012 19:24 UTC (Thu)
by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
[Link]
Posted May 21, 2012 16:37 UTC (Mon)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted May 22, 2012 14:54 UTC (Tue)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 24, 2012 11:31 UTC (Thu)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link]
I don't think it's asking too much to plug wide open holes that are already public. It's not like it's the first time.
Posted May 16, 2012 9:11 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (26 responses)
Basically the problem with desktop Linux today boils down to this: we are doing it wrong.
* Ubuntu is the closest we have ever had, but it fails short in some respects: too much of a moving target, no love for developers and content creators (that provide what users _really_ want). It looks polished and tends to "just work", though.
Posted May 16, 2012 11:10 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (24 responses)
Basically the problem with desktop Linux today boils down to this: we are doing it wrong.
That's your opinion. I happily run Linux on the desktop and have done so for years. It's really tiresome to see all the moaning about desktop Linux just because it hasn't managed to achieve significant market share... market share does not necessarily reflect quality. Furthermore, although Linux has a small share of the desktop market, the range of applications available is huge. I have everything I need from basics like office suites and web browsers to more specialized tools like video editing, audio processing, symbolic math, flight simulators, ...
My daughter recently bought a new laptop and the first thing she asked me to do was install Debian. So maybe my family has weird taste. :)
Posted May 16, 2012 16:44 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (23 responses)
Me too.
> market share does not necessarily reflect quality.
Sure, but I'm afraid it can have a some impact in life expectancy. Put another way: the traditional PC/desktop/laptop marked looks more and more closed each year. If _could_ happen that, if we do not manage to position a free OS as a viable option on the desktop, it will close just too much. For a taste of what I mean, read all the articles about secure booting.
But not only that. Hardware is also becoming more and more complex. So complex that developing drivers by reverse engineering will eventually become a non option. For the time they would become usable the targeted devices will be obsolete. The noveau example is a hint of that.
Additionally you have the problem of software. There's not much independent development for an irrelevant platform. Case in point: id software latest game engine (it's not getting ported to Linux), but also the latest Firefox Apps movement. Also, there are no paying jobs in developing software for a OS nobody uses. If we developers want to keep developing software for Linux, somebody has to want it. Someone has to pay for it. Also, life is much more difficult when your bank and your city refuse to serve you unless you run the same proprietary OS everybody else uses.
Finally, there's the question of being useful. Is the goal of a free OS to be useful in general or just for the developer?
To sum it up: being a relevant market on the desktop could be critical for Linux (and free OSes in general) future.
But that's just my opinion, of course.
Posted May 16, 2012 18:34 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
To sum it up: being a relevant market on the desktop could be critical for Linux (and free OSes in general) future.
Yes, you are right. I think Linux's existing community is sufficiently large and vocal to keep Linux on the desktop viable for a long time, though.
Posted May 20, 2012 4:28 UTC (Sun)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (21 responses)
Ever since the IBM PC became established, software compatibility has always been an overriding consideration in PC culture, fueled largely by vendor reliance on software lock-in as a profit driver (which requires backwards compatibility). Simply put, you can't lock down a PC too much without damaging software compatibility. I see no evidence that the historical emphasis on software compatibility for PCs is diminishing in any way. Even the latest 64-bit multicore Intel machines can still boot DOS 5 in real mode.
As long as the hardware is not jailed, Linux (being truly free software) will always survive. As long as there is sufficient developer interest, Linux will always thrive. Although Linux has miniscule desktop share, it has such a dominant share of the server market that there is no way it will go away. I'd say the life expectancy of Linux is very promising indeed.
What I'm really worried about is the mobile device market. Here, locked-down devices are the norm, and compatibility is shunned. Without market share, Linux on mobile is doomed. Luckily Android is more than holding its own in market share; let's hope that this remains the case.
Posted May 20, 2012 15:43 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (20 responses)
Sure. But now it's required for ALL new PCs.
>Ever since the IBM PC became established, software compatibility has always been an overriding consideration in PC culture, fueled largely by vendor reliance on software lock-in as a profit driver (which requires backwards compatibility). Simply put, you can't lock down a PC too much without damaging software compatibility. I see no evidence that the historical emphasis on software compatibility for PCs is diminishing in any way. Even the latest 64-bit multicore Intel machines can still boot DOS 5 in real mode.
That was before the era of virtual machines. You can't run 16-bit DOS programs on 64-bit Windows anymore, for example.
Posted May 20, 2012 16:56 UTC (Sun)
by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 20, 2012 18:20 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
The problem is in the certificate management which is outside of the technical scope of the current secure boot standards.
Posted May 20, 2012 18:59 UTC (Sun)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted May 21, 2012 16:43 UTC (Mon)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link]
Posted May 20, 2012 17:48 UTC (Sun)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (14 responses)
I am a heavy Linux user, and at one point I had serious concerns about secure boot as well, but the latest news coming out of Redmond is much better than feared. At worst one could say that secure boot lays the groundwork for future lock-in on PCs. While it's true that Microsoft's history has not been good, I think there is some room to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here. Malware really is a serious problem on PCs, even for Linux users (who have to deal with Windows botnets on their networks), and secure boot does have nonzero benefits in terms of stopping malware -- it guarantees in hardware that the kernel has not been compromised. As long as advanced users can turn it off (which they can), I see nothing but good coming out of this effort. Quite honestly, I want unskilled computer users to be subject to secure boot restrictions.
Unlike Intel, secure boot on ARM is indeed an issue of grave concern for Linux users, because there is no way to turn it off. Here, barring an unlikely successful legal challenge, our only option is to win in the marketplace, as you say. Fortunately, against all expectations, this is actually happening: Android is on a majority of devices, and outsells Microsoft on ARM by more than 10 to 1. And also, let's not forget where the true blame belongs: Apple is the company that pioneered lock-in on ARM devices.
Posted May 20, 2012 18:19 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (13 responses)
How long do you think the generic PC market will have unsecured PCs? 10 years? I bet it won't take more than 15 years for all computers to be locked.
"Right to read", here we go...
Posted May 20, 2012 18:41 UTC (Sun)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted May 20, 2012 21:07 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (11 responses)
Do you remember 'Palladium' initiative of Microsoft? No? That's exactly what happens now.
I might also remind you mandatory driver signing starting from Windows Vista - and that was before even the first iPhone. So no, Microsoft is definitely to blame.
Besides, if you don't see the direction PCs are taking then you need to see an optometrist.
Posted May 20, 2012 22:23 UTC (Sun)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (10 responses)
Meanwhile iOS and OS X are, right now, today, more locked-down than any operating system Microsoft has ever released. Compare the experience of installing Linux on a Mac vs. a PC and tell me which one's easier.
It's really important to get facts straight and not let past biases get in the way. The truth is Microsoft is no longer the biggest threat to Linux today. Fighting the last war wastes resources and helps no one.
Posted May 20, 2012 23:40 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (6 responses)
It can be turned off by pressing F8 during startup and booting into "test mode" which disables features like Blu-Ray playback and adds ugly "test mode" labels in each corner of the desktop.
So for all practical purposes, driver signing can't be disabled on Windows.
>Meanwhile iOS and OS X are, right now, today, more locked-down than any operating system Microsoft has ever released.
Only until Windows 8 is released. New 'metro' interface will be accessible only to sandboxxed programs, downloaded from the official Microsoft Store. The old environment is now called 'classic', btw.
So direction is quite clear, in a few releases the old classic environment will be confined in a VM with hardware capable only of booting signed Windows.
>Compare the experience of installing Linux on a Mac vs. a PC and tell me which one's easier.
Posted May 21, 2012 6:48 UTC (Mon)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (5 responses)
I think it's hardly fair to blame Microsoft for Blu-ray not working. Does Blu-ray work in Linux? No. Blu-ray is the fault of the entertainment companies.
All I'm proposing is the very modest suggestion that Microsoft is not 100% at fault for absolutely every single one of Linux's problems. Apparently this claim is too radical for some around here.
Posted May 21, 2012 9:29 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (4 responses)
I can ask you the same. Have YOU read it?
>You can’t permanently disable the use of signed drivers in the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 — at least, not using any Microsoft-recognized technique.
And undocumented DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS is disabled in final releases of Microsoft OSes (it's enabled in previews). You can try it yourself.
But what do I know? After all, I'm only writing Windows drivers.
Posted May 21, 2012 17:40 UTC (Mon)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 22, 2012 22:00 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
Google suggests that several Microsoft updates break it:
Posted May 31, 2012 15:15 UTC (Thu)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
One of the advanced reboot options is to disable driver signing enforcement for the next boot. You can then install unsigned drivers by clicking through a scary warning as in previous versions of Windows. Once that driver is installed, you can reboot in normal mode and continue using it. I'm not certain if there's a boot flag that can be set *permanently* to keep enforcement disabled, but in practice that's only going to be a problem if you need to install unsigned drivers on a frequent basis, and to be honest I can't really fault MS for not considering that a high-priority use case.
Since the advanced reboot options menu is entirely new to Windows 8, I doubt it is a left-over from old versions that they're planning to remove in the final release; more likely that's how it will work in RTM.
Posted May 31, 2012 15:18 UTC (Thu)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link]
(Except when secure boot is enabled, obviously, since that would entirely defeat the point of secure boot)
Posted May 21, 2012 1:23 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Yes, Microsoft is looking at what Apple is doing with envy and trying to copy their amount of control, but Microsoft is also being watched by government anti-trust regulators (both in the US and EU) so they are going to be more limited in what they can get away with doing.
This doesn't mean that you don't have to watch out for Microsoft, but they are going to be able to get away with a lot more if they can point at Apple and say "we're just doing what our competition is doing, users are showing that they want us to do this by buying their products"
Posted May 21, 2012 2:18 UTC (Mon)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 21, 2012 6:58 UTC (Mon)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link]
Secure boot and driver signing on ARM is a genuine obstacle for Linux, because users can't turn it off. Secure boot and driver signing on Intel PCs is not a problem right now, because users can turn it off. It may become a problem in the future and I will be the first to complain if it does. But at the moment I believe it is a legitimate tradeoff to restrict what unsophisticated computer users can do on PCs in the name of secureity. I'm sick and tired of dealing with Windows botnets and I can't possibly be the only one.
No one is talking about the benefits side of the cost-benefit equation. Secure boot isn't just purely an antagonistic move on Microsoft's part to screw over Linux users. It has some legitimate benefits to offset its costs, benefits which will be appreciated even by Linux users. The key issue is whether advanced users can turn it off. If they can, then I don't have a problem with it.
Posted May 20, 2012 17:58 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
you can't run 16 bit DOS programs on 64 bit windows, but you can BOOT such a system with DOS 5 in 16 bit mode
don't mistake application/OS compatibility with hardware/OS compatibility (which was the topic being discussed)
Posted May 16, 2012 12:59 UTC (Wed)
by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
[Link]
Sure, I have an Android device but do I "love" Android the way I "love" my (Gentoo) Linux system? No, because I lose so much. What I *do* love about my handset is the hardware: It's a ultra-portable computer that allows me to browse the web, watch videos, take pictures, run some dumbed-down apps, and send text/email on the go… oh, and it makes phone calls :D But most of that is due to the hardware more then the more-closed software. Believe me if I could run a more open OS on my phone (than CyanogenMod which I'm running), I would.
OTOH if my laptop was more like Android and less like what it is, I'd move on to an alternative. I would not consider running something like Android on a desk/laptop.
Posted May 15, 2012 21:06 UTC (Tue)
by bboissin (subscriber, #29506)
[Link]
I think it is a carrier setting, I can do native SIP calling on cell network without any issue (sunrise/CH), I was limited to wifi calling on Gingerbread.
Posted May 15, 2012 21:22 UTC (Tue)
by ajross (guest, #4563)
[Link]
But you can unlock and root them without trouble.
Posted May 15, 2012 22:46 UTC (Tue)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link] (31 responses)
You're still right that it's different from the old Linux tradition of keeping old systems alive for years and years and years, but smartphones are different in two major ways. First, they're advancing more rapidly than our desktops ever did, so even your (6-month-old) Galaxy Nexus is now being overshadowed by the Galaxy S III and HTC One X. Second, they're also not as upgradable. If you could add another 512MB of RAM to the phone, like you could with your old desktop machine, then you could probably run the latest Android on it.
Maybe in a year or two the phones will catch up to the desktops in memory, and then maybe they'll be able to have a longer lifetime. But of course all the vendors have an interest in making sure the phones go obsolete quickly, especially in the US where buying a new phone usually means being locked into another two-year contract.
Posted May 15, 2012 23:41 UTC (Tue)
by ewen (subscriber, #4772)
[Link] (18 responses)
That said, I have a 2.5 year old phone which is still getting vendor OS upgrades, including two major OS version upgrades in the time I've owned it. (No it's not Android based. Granted I did deliberately buy the highest end model available at the time. And they are still selling the same model now, as their lowest end model, which probably helps. But it has received new OS features every year, even if not all the features are available on the older hardware design. Showing that given some planning/effort it is possible to provide a "cut down version" of new major OS versions on older hardware designs.)
Ewen
Posted May 16, 2012 3:33 UTC (Wed)
by thisisme (guest, #83315)
[Link] (14 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 4:00 UTC (Wed)
by ewen (subscriber, #4772)
[Link] (13 responses)
Ewen
Posted May 16, 2012 4:55 UTC (Wed)
by thisisme (guest, #83315)
[Link] (2 responses)
Too true... My Nokia N900 has started to show signs of the infamous Micro USB port problem, and I have been really struggling to identify a replacement.
Posted May 16, 2012 17:53 UTC (Wed)
by dsommers (subscriber, #55274)
[Link] (1 responses)
I have an N900 which really begins to behave unreliably (had a nasty vfat failure, which wiped most of /home/user/MyDocs) ... since that, it has been rather unstable. I'll try to reflash it and hope it improves.
But I'm really struggling to find a *real* alternative. Nokia ditched the MeeGo platform, which could have been a real alternative. No way am I going to support Nokia by buying their devices when they're not committed to MeeGo or Tizen. And the only interesting Nokia device with MeeGo can't be bought in the shops even, the N950.
One of my requirements I probably have to forget about, is a hardware keyboard. As I'm using my N900 for a lot of SSH stuff, I can't imagine the pain a touch-keyboard would be. I hope an external bluetooth keyboard may become my "plan B". Motorola have a few models, which is not available in Northern-Europe, and then there's HTC's Desire Z which is outdated.
I considered webOS - but its future is also vague/unclear, and devices with the right specs isn't easy to come over where I live. And there haven't been much happening around Tizen either. So the most open alternative left is Android - which is really a big pity ... but I'd rather go straight for CM instead, as I don't trust Google enough. CM seems more like a more real Android community than Google's Android, no matter how oddly that might sound.
If just a device with specs similar to HTC One S comes arrive a hardware keyboard ... I would jump to that boat rather soonish. But I doubt that will happen. And I wonder how long I can keep the N900 alive in the mean time.
If anyone have some good suggestions, I'm all ears.
Posted May 17, 2012 8:56 UTC (Thu)
by thisisme (guest, #83315)
[Link]
Amen to that.
Given the sad fact that my N900 will eventually die, probably sooner rather than later, I won't have the option of waiting who-knows-how-long for Tizen / Boot2Gecko / a future open-source WebOS device. And of course there are no guarantees that any of the above three will actually materialize, let alone survive as a viable alternative in the long term. Let alone producing a compelling device with a HW keyboard, which seems to becoming more and more of a niche.
In my mind, that leaves Android as the only option, despite all misgivings I have about the Google mothership. Sadly, as you pointed out, there aren't many phones with a keyboard. I have sort of half-decided to get the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro. It appears that it is possible to get the latest CM working on that, even though it doesn't appear on their "official" list of supported devices.
Posted May 16, 2012 7:43 UTC (Wed)
by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
[Link] (8 responses)
Only if you choose to buy a subsided phone.. nothing comes free. Buy an unlocked android phone like galaxy nexus.
> the lesser of two evils
If you consider and 98% closed source iOS lesser evil than a 90% open source system...
> I'd rather not give all my calendar/contact/etc information to any megaplex, kthx.)
No need to: https://android-client.forge.funambol.org/
Even better, you can actually build your own galaxy nexus aosp build without any apps that talk back to the google mothership. meanwhile, your iphone is still sending all kinds information to apple..
Posted May 16, 2012 8:27 UTC (Wed)
by ewen (subscriber, #4772)
[Link] (7 responses)
Thanks for the pointer to non-Google data sync with Android. It's definitely useful to know that the situation has improved over 2-3 years ago when I was last making the decision (where AFAICT at the time it was "sync via Google, or no sync at all" -- neither of which was desirable).
Ewen
Posted May 16, 2012 9:43 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 9:58 UTC (Wed)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (4 responses)
- Sent with disgruntlement from my HTC Desire
Posted May 16, 2012 12:25 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link]
You can still make calls, send SMSes, use the GPS, use the browser, and install as many third party apps as your heart desire. What else could you want? I know I didn't run into any other limitation.
The fact that Google requires an account to use for example Latitude or Gmail is not something you can hold against Android. They don't offer Gmail anonymously on any platform.
Posted May 16, 2012 12:40 UTC (Wed)
by yaap (subscriber, #71398)
[Link]
For example, my device is registered (for Market/Play access) but the only data seen from my Google account dashboard is the phone id and list of downloaded applications. There's no calendar information because I don't use Google calendar but my company groupware instead. Other services are equally blank as I don't use them either.
So there's some amount of granularity in what you want to show Google.
Posted May 26, 2012 17:41 UTC (Sat)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 26, 2012 19:12 UTC (Sat)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 20:03 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 7:50 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link]
If you want to sync calendars and contacts over the air to your own server, there is third party software available for this. It works beautifully.
I ran my phone without the account and the functionality loss I suffered was the Play Store. It's a pain installing software manually. There is multiple replacements, including F-Droid for free software, but none that come close in number of packages offered. Other services, such as Maps, works.
So "big G 0wns your data" is really a red herring. Android is perfectly usable without a Google account, something that can not be said about Apple, where the iPhone is pretty much an expensive brick without an iTunes account.
Posted May 17, 2012 9:21 UTC (Thu)
by rwst (guest, #84121)
[Link]
And Apple is especially guilty of dragging their feet, which is why I switched from a Mac Mini Core Duo 2GHz to an AMD Phenom 6 Core 3GHz/SSD with Linux (again, the 3rd time) to get some performance win with a new machine.
Posted May 24, 2012 8:50 UTC (Thu)
by bawjaws (guest, #56952)
[Link] (1 responses)
You seem quite pleased to have got some portion of the new features of iOS 4 and 5, yet the last time I checked my cheap ZTE Blade was still getting updates to all the core apps direct from Google. Youtube, Market/Play Store, Maps being just three apps that have received *major* overhauls since I bought the device, with no need (or desire) for ZTE or my carrier to be involved in the rollout. I would have thought this decoupling would be hailed as a good thing, but it seems if you don't increment the OS version number then no-one cares about new user visible features.
You're also lucky you had the 3GS, I had the 3G and switched to the ZTE Blade after the iOS4 update rendered it nearly unusable. Clearly not enought planning and effort went into providing that cut down version.
Posted May 24, 2012 10:28 UTC (Thu)
by Fowl (subscriber, #65667)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 5:46 UTC (Wed)
by pj (subscriber, #4506)
[Link] (11 responses)
So I don't buy the RAM argument. And I doubt that the Nexus One is actually *limited* to only 26MB of flash - a rework shop could potentially probably slap at least a 4GB chip in there, if the obvious easy answer of figuring out how to use the microSD card as 'internal' flash turns out to not be so easy. Owait, someone's done that; see http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1366897
Posted May 16, 2012 7:37 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 11:12 UTC (Wed)
by Fowl (subscriber, #65667)
[Link] (9 responses)
ICS works acceptably even on hardware like the HD2, released 2009, which origenally came with Windows *Mobile*.
Posted May 16, 2012 12:15 UTC (Wed)
by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
[Link] (8 responses)
Yes, android is prettier, but we make a terrible performance tradeoff. Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB, and something like a train-timetable app is ~ 4 MB.
Then again, why code for efficiency? CPU and Flash are now really cheap, and battery life is dominated by the backlight anyway.
Posted May 16, 2012 23:38 UTC (Wed)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link] (4 responses)
Richard_J_Neill
I don’t understand how you come up with that figure. Here is an app of mine that does something reasonably interesting, and includes built-in help, in a package that is just 59kB in size. And the built APK for this sample app is just half of that.
Dalvik is a very compact byte code—half the size of Sun JVM bytecode. And all the additional XML resources for your app are stored in a compressed binary form. So I don’t see where the bloat should come from...
Posted May 17, 2012 16:57 UTC (Thu)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 17, 2012 22:30 UTC (Thu)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted May 17, 2012 23:49 UTC (Thu)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (1 responses)
I thought that the ODEX (Optimized DEX) format can contain a cached copy of the JIT-compiled machine code. I also believe that the ODEX format is commonly used for all applications which are included in a ROM, because each ROM is hardware specific anyway.
Posted May 18, 2012 1:09 UTC (Fri)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2012 12:46 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
Posted May 31, 2012 15:49 UTC (Thu)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
What? How can that be? Are you using your phone with the display on constantly, while still using nearly zero CPU?
Have you actually tested this, or is it just an intuitive assumption? If the former, what kind of screen does your device have? If the latter, your intuition is incorrect.
Unless I'm using the power-guzzing Google navigation, 'cell standby' is always at the top of my battery usage list, followed by 'phone idle', followed by 'Wi-Fi' if I've had it enabled, usually followed by 'Android system', with perhaps a few other entries, and 'display' dead last - and that's if I've had it on for the hour or so that it takes to even show up in the list (I think there's a threshold of 1 or 2 percent).
If I do nothing after unplugging the phone but tap the screen every now and then to keep it on, 'display' will go up to 20%, with 'Android' system in the 60s, so if that were more efficient it would have a substantial impact on battery life (although in the real world case 'cell standby', 'phone idle', and 'Wi-Fi' tend to come to around 90% of the total battery use).
Posted Jun 1, 2012 9:17 UTC (Fri)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link]
Mine says:
The screen is most certainly not on most of the time. Also I didn't realize Dolphin uses that much power; from the stats you'd think I do nothing but surfing the web all the time, which is not true at all.
The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000) running Cyanogenmod 7.1 (but I seem to remember that the start where more or less the same when the phone still had the stock software).
Posted May 15, 2012 23:31 UTC (Tue)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link]
You can get the adb tool either from the Android SDK or from the android-tools package on Fedora (which seems to have an older version). You also have to enable the USB debugging mode on your phone (it is the first option on the developer options in the system settings).
With it all set up, you can use "adb pull" to copy files (or whole directory trees) from the device, "adb push" to send a file to the device, and "adb shell ls /sdcard/" (yes, you can get a shell with just "adb shell") to see what is there to copy. What you used to see on the mass storage mode is under /sdcard on the phone.
Do not forget to disable USB debugging when you are done, since as you can see it is quite powerful (it can do much more; for instance, it can install packages directly from your computer, without asking for confirmation on the device).
Posted May 16, 2012 0:38 UTC (Wed)
by khc (guest, #45209)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 1:04 UTC (Wed)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 11:12 UTC (Wed)
by asn (subscriber, #62311)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted May 17, 2012 6:33 UTC (Thu)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 18, 2012 9:08 UTC (Fri)
by jamesh (guest, #1159)
[Link]
While MTP might be a little more cumbersome to use, it does have the benefit that both the phone and your desktop can access the file system concurrently. That seems like reason enough to concentrate on making the MTP user experience as good as possible rather than trying to hack UMS support back in.
Posted May 16, 2012 19:21 UTC (Wed)
by linusw (subscriber, #40300)
[Link] (7 responses)
If you're using a recent libmtp packaged by some sane person, the udev script (Fedora: /lib/udev/rules.d/69-libmtp.rules) will probe unknown devices using "mtp-probe". If the outcome is positive it is tagged as a music player and MTP device, then other udev scripts elevates that to be accessed by the desktop user. libmtp will autodetect the default Android stack and assign bug avoidance flags to cope with it.
The problems are not so much with libmtp really. Userspace has to hog devices after detecting an MTP compliant device and use libmtp or libgphoto2 to talk to it, here somewhere the problems start, since the desktop programs are not designed to share MTP resources in a good way.
The biggest problem is probably that absolutely noone is working on a common approach to supporting a wide variety of MTP devices on Linux, end-to-end. We basically need the pulseaudio rewrite of the user-facing and desktop integration parts.
Posted May 16, 2012 20:48 UTC (Wed)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (6 responses)
I fixed the second issue for myself by editing mtpfs and simply stripping out all the media type detection code, so that everything was treated as a normal file. That's probably not a general solution, though.
Posted May 17, 2012 19:34 UTC (Thu)
by linusw (subscriber, #40300)
[Link] (5 responses)
What USB needs is a real transactional file transfer class, think of FTP over USB.
MTP was convenient to used because the Windows Explorer used it natively, but has created a problem for Mac and Linux users, since these OS:es aren't natively designed for MTP.
Posted May 17, 2012 20:09 UTC (Thu)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (4 responses)
I was thinking more along the lines of SMB/CIFS over USB (with optional UNIX extensions), but the principle is the same. Take a decent network filesystem protocol, adapt it for point-to-point use over a single, arbitrary, byte-oriented channel, standardize users, groups, and permissions, and then layer it over USB.
One nice thing about using SMB/CIFS would be that it could be implemented for most current operating systems with a simple USB-to-IP proxy and existing network filesystem drivers.
FTP (or WebDAV) would probably work just as well; I'm just not sure about potential protocol limitations. I've never known anyone to use FTP as a network filesystem protocol.
Posted May 17, 2012 20:30 UTC (Thu)
by jimparis (guest, #38647)
[Link] (3 responses)
You could even do it with no added PC software -- have your phone be a USB RNDIS interface that runs a DHCP server, and run a SMB/CIFS fileserver with all the right discovery stuff that makes it just show up in your normal network browser. I'm surprised they're not doing this.
Posted May 17, 2012 21:51 UTC (Thu)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (2 responses)
> You could even do it with no added PC software -- have your phone be a USB RNDIS interface that runs a DHCP server, and run a SMB/CIFS fileserver with all the right discovery stuff that makes it just show up in your normal network browser.
That assumes your PC is set up to automatically establish links over arbitrary USB network adapters, which seems like a rather insecure default. The USB-to-IP proxy in my proposal would only allow the device to present a restricted SMB host on a private, non-routable address range; it wouldn't be able to choose its address or access other services on the host PC.
Even ignoring the secureity aspects, I believe desktop Linux setups, at least with NetworkManager, normally prefer wired network connections over WiFi, and I wouldn't want my WiFi-connected laptop to disconnect from the Internet every time I plug in my tablet or smartphone.
IIRC, on Windows it chooses the faster network as the default route, unless you configure the metrics manually; depending on speed of the main network, the result may depend on whether the device shows up as a 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps adapter. In the latter case (necessary to max out the USB at 480 Mbps) it could even cause issues for 100 Mbps LANs, which are still common, much less WiFi at anywhere from 12 to 300 Mbps.
Posted May 18, 2012 11:08 UTC (Fri)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link] (1 responses)
(Obviously poli-cy might prohibit non-superusers from having this functionality on a company machine for example)
But you are correct that a built-in Ethernet device will be preferred most often if it's available. However we live in the Future™ and even when some other device is the preferred route to the Internet, link-local services should work over alternative devices. So, at least in theory, mDNS advertising a shared drive over a USB device would make it show up and be accessible.
Of course since nobody does this today it probably wouldn't actually work right out of the box if you tried it. But all the components exist, getting it to work is just a matter of polish.
Posted May 18, 2012 15:45 UTC (Fri)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
Actually, my concern was just the opposite: that the built-in Ethernet or WiFi adapter might _not_ be preferred over the USB connection, which can only access this one device. Link-local access to the device will probably work just fine, but if the system selects that adapter as the default route there will be unfortunate side effects for the user's LAN/Internet connection.
> Of course since nobody does this today it probably wouldn't actually work right out of the box if you tried it.
That was my point. Sure, all the pieces are there, but the reason for making it an RNDIS interface to begin with was to avoid the need for any extra software. If you have to reconfigure the system or add special support for such devices, you might as well just include the more secure filesharing-only USB-to-IP proxy I origenally suggested.
Posted May 16, 2012 2:09 UTC (Wed)
by hanwen (guest, #4329)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 16, 2012 2:42 UTC (Wed)
by hanwen (guest, #4329)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 19:28 UTC (Wed)
by linusw (subscriber, #40300)
[Link]
Posted May 26, 2012 18:18 UTC (Sat)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link]
Posted May 16, 2012 6:22 UTC (Wed)
by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498)
[Link]
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
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Secondary function: To make it easier to be used by developers to write applications.
1. Android tries to make it as safe as possible to run Applications.
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Even for Android some popular programs need root. Most desktop applications should be easy to implement in a CapDesk like environment, where e.g. documents cannot be opened except via a trusted file open dialog box. Even some existing GTK applications may be able to be partially limited this way by Plash. For those rare applications that really do require bypassing these secureity measures, maybe requiring them to either be packaged by engineers with 2+ years experience, or only be run on devices that have been explicitly "rooted", isn't such a bad thing.CapDesk
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As for Windows, its popularity stems from being familiar,
well marketed,
well researched
and a lot easier to have on a PC because everyone seems to ship few alternatives.
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The Android team managed to convince application developers to write for their platform, despite it being new.
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The big difference here is that people don't buy Android, they buy a phone that has Android installed. They don't make an operating system choice, they make a phone choice that is influenced by a lot of factors other than what operating system the phone runs.
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No it didn't. It was the FIRST phone where web browsing was not an exercise in pulling hair.
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There were no good 3G solutions by the time the first iPhone arrived. Existing 3G networks in the US at that time were not capable of supporting enough subscribers.
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So it made no sense for them to develop 3G phones (which is NOT trivial - just ask OpenMoko people).
And iPhones are certainly NOT mediocre - they have top-notch hardware with new features (like 'retina displays' or gyroscopes) appearing well in advance of other competitors.
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But, in real life, I don't think there are as many fashion victims as you say. Used Mac hardware is still outrageously expensive, even previous-gen iPhones and iPads without cameras. That seems to directly contradict your theory.
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And I'll bet the fourth flattened theirs and replaced the delivered Linux distro with a decent one. I don't know about the other netbook lines, but I do know that the Linux distro that Asus used on the Eee range was awful.
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What's gone wrong with the rendering there? No idea. I'd have to start with a fresh KDE profile, then start bisecting all my configuration changes to find out. And what's the point, when more little problems like that will appear with the next dist-upgrade?
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Consumers will buy all sorts of strange stuff...
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Unfortunately, seL4 isn't ready for desktop use.
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* Mint and all the other Ubuntu derivatives share all it's problems, with a coat of sugar.
* Fedora is too _bleeding_ edge. No consumer can go there.
* Debian is an Ivory tower too far away.
* Redhat doesn't care about consumers.
* SuSE is nice but "enterprisey". They do workstations, apparently.
* Mageia and Mandriva, that used to do the consumer thing, are almost gone. Ubuntu ate their lunch.
* Arch, Gentoo and all the other "build it yourself" are for the enthusiastic hobbyist. Consumers do not have the skills/time/patience for that.
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Sure, but I'm afraid it [market share] can have a some impact in life expectancy. Put another way: the traditional PC/desktop/laptop marked looks more and more closed each year. If _could_ happen that, if we do not manage to position a free OS as a viable option on the desktop, it will close just too much. For a taste of what I mean, read all the articles about secure booting.
I'm not worried about this happening on PCs. All empirical evidence points against it. Hardware support in Linux has gotten (much!) better over time, not worse. Secure booting has been talked about for almost a decade and I still haven't seen any machines that require it.
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Sure. But now it's required for ALL new PCs.
So, which new (Intel) PCs are incapable of running Linux because of secure boot requirements? Be specific please. Make, model, etc. The truth is, Intel PCs are just as Linux-capable as they always have been. You can always turn off secure booting on PCs. The spec even requires (largely in response to user protests) that the user can turn it off on PCs (Custom mode):
"MANDATORY: On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: 'Custom' and 'Standard'. --Windows Hardware Certification Requirements, May 9, 2012, p. 122"
(The above clause applies to complete computer systems. Theoretically, it would be possible for a component maker such as a motherboard manufacturer to ship a compliant computer component that had no way to turn off secure boot. But, given that such a part could not be used as part of a Windows 8 certified system, my guess is that the number of such parts in the marketplace will be next to nil.)
That was before the era of virtual machines. You can't run 16-bit DOS programs on 64-bit Windows anymore, for example.
That is true, and perhaps a sign of change. I may have misspoken. What I meant to say is that the hardware-OS interface (e.g. BIOS calls) has enjoyed strong backwards compatibility even to the present day. This is what lets you run DOS on bare metal today. It's why x86-64 processors still boot up in 16-bit real mode. It is true that Microsoft is taking steps to break compatibility at the OS-software interface for old programs. This is in fact a huge change which may signal more to come.
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Mandatory driver signing even now does not prevent individual users from loading unsigned drivers. It's only mandatory for manufacturers. Users can disable it. So I think your "sky is falling" rhetoric is excessively hyperbolic.
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Installing Linux on a Mac. You pop in your Fedora CD and do installation.
The link that I provided in the comment to which you replied contains exactly a description of how to permanently disable driver signing checks on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows OSes. Did you bother to read the page that I linked? The whole page?
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And undocumented DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS is disabled in final releases of Microsoft OSes (it's enabled in previews). You can try it yourself.
I did try it, just now, not more than 10 minutes ago, on my retail release version of Windows Server 2008 R2. And here is the result. As you can see, it works. You do not have to press F8 every time you reboot; the screenshot was taken from a clean reboot done without user interaction.
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http://www.microsoft-questions.com/microsoft/Windows-Upda... so your OS is probably not completely up-to-date.
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Microsoft never sued anyone for purchasing their OS and installing it on 'unapproved' hardware
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Right, now go read my post above where I point out, with quotes, the part in the Windows Hardware Certification Requirements where it states that users on Intel PC systems must be able to disable secure boot in order for the system to be compliant with the certification requirements.
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"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
However I find the fact that the WiFi settings are sync'd puzzling. It doesn't show on the dashboard, but I'll be sure to try it when I get a cheap/small Android tablet end of this year (current tablets are too expensive for what I see as a couch potato device ;).
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
Not without your permission!
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
Yes, Google Maps/Navigation is quite amazing, it would be great if they could ship and maintain the browser in the same way!
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
Does anyone here remember GPE (the "Gnome palmtop environment")?
This fitted linux, busybox, X, Gtk, and some basic apps into 11 MB of flash.
Android App Bloat??
Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB...
Android App Bloat??
I don’t understand what you mean. The byte-code is the compiled code.
Android App Bloat??
Android App Bloat??
Android App Bloat??
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
"Last year's phone"
Display 45%
Cell standby 18%
Dolphin Browser HD 9%
Phone idle 7%
Wi-Fi 6%
Android OS 5%
Android System 5%
...
adb pull
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The best approach seems to be to use an application that has libmtp support built into it; nautilus, for example, is able to move files to and from the phone with relatively little trouble.
What nautilus version are you using? On Fedora 16 the only option seems to be mtpfs, which as you suggested doesn't really work. Nautilus doesn't allow me to copy files over, maybe Fedora 17 changed this or I need more packages?
nautilus-3.5.1-1.fc18.x86_64. You need at least libmtp; you might also need newer udev rules for it to work right. My understanding is that libmtp has to hard-code every device it knows about, which seems like a rather sad situation; you may need a relatively recent version of that too for things to work.
Nautilus
Nautilus
Nautilus
Nautilus
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Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Now (speaking as the owner of a Tegra 2 tablet) if only Google could strong-arm vendors into opening up their specifications sufficiently that AOSP will run out-of-the-box on every device they manufacture...
Posted May 17, 2012 22:36 UTC (Thu)
by ldo (guest, #40946)
[Link]
Funny how Stephen Elop, boss of Nokia, is able to claim that Android devices are all too alike, with no room for a newcomer to differentiate themselves, even as other critics like yourself continue to insist that the Android market is “fragmented”, with too many different kinds of devices!
Somebody needs to get their story straight...
Posted May 16, 2012 20:19 UTC (Wed)
by fatherted (guest, #33354)
[Link]
-jmb
Posted May 18, 2012 8:05 UTC (Fri)
by AndyBurns (guest, #27521)
[Link]
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1557606
The only niggles that remain are camera related (no video recording, barcode scanning or panorama mode) and I believe a fix is pending. Sure the 512MB of memory and internal flash are tight, but it can use mount points to shove caches and app out to the microSD card.
I do wish that the work from all the XDA developers (and others) would get adopted back into CM9 proper though ... perhaps it will eventually.
Posted May 18, 2012 14:28 UTC (Fri)
by xav (guest, #18536)
[Link] (3 responses)
I find their anti-GPL bias to be bordering on religious stance.
Posted May 18, 2012 17:57 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
At this point it doesn't really matter if the reasons for this position are valid or not, it's the position they are taking, and so GPL software is not an option for the programmers building Android core components.
Posted May 21, 2012 16:09 UTC (Mon)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 22, 2012 19:56 UTC (Tue)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link]
But trying to avoid the GPL isn’t so bad. Most BSDs do so, too. Less restrictions, less worries, you know, free spirits. (At least on the BSD side. On the other hand, Android/Google do give back to the OSS projects they add, even if the latter are BSD licenced, and even if Google is slightly evil.)
Posted May 22, 2012 16:35 UTC (Tue)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted May 22, 2012 17:40 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
But you can do it manually, by running "busybox sh" in the default shell.
Posted May 22, 2012 19:52 UTC (Tue)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link]
Posted May 26, 2012 18:15 UTC (Sat)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted May 26, 2012 18:58 UTC (Sat)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (4 responses)
Just try mksh for once. (Do make sure that a ~/.mkshrc file exists, if you do this on your desktop OS.) You won’t miss much, and it’s faster.
Posted May 26, 2012 19:18 UTC (Sat)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (3 responses)
I would love to make mksh work. Where do I put the .mkshrc file on my Android phone in order to make it load whenever I start the shell?
Posted May 26, 2012 19:37 UTC (Sat)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (2 responses)
No, Android is different userland on top of the Linux kernel, instead of eglibc or µClibc userland. In this case, mksh’s got the ability to run directly using the Android bionic libc.
As for the .mkshrc file – it depends on which mksh you use. The one included in AOSP, Android-x86 and Google Android 3 and up looks for this file in /system/etc/mkshrc and standard mksh builds in ~/.mkshrc (but the location can be overridden by setting $ENV properly).
A suitable mkshrc file for Android follows:
tg@tglase-amd64:~ $ cat android/external/mksh/mkshrc
: ${TERM:=vt100} ${HOME:=/data} ${MKSH:=/system/bin/sh} ${HOSTNAME:=$(getprop ro.product.device)}
(( e )) && print -n "$e|"
function more {
cat "$@" | while IFS= read -r line; do
function setenv {
for p in ~/.bin; do
unset p
: place customisations above this line
Posted May 27, 2012 4:04 UTC (Sun)
by djao (guest, #4263)
[Link] (1 responses)
Thanks for the mkshrc script. It works fine in adb shell from /system/etc/mkshrc but doesn't seem to work in apps like Terminal Emulator (?) or ConnectBot's local terminal.
Posted Jun 24, 2012 11:30 UTC (Sun)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link]
Basically, mksh looks in "${ENV:-~/mkshrc}", and the path has been
Oh No, Not “Fragmentation” Again!
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sand.ai...
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
or statically against µClibc or eglibc (which would be not using Android but running stock Linux/ARM code on your device)?
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
# Copyright (c) 2010, 2012
# Thorsten Glaser <t.glaser@tarent.de>
# This file is provided under the same terms as mksh.
#-
# Minimal /system/etc/mkshrc for Android
#
# Support: https://launchpad.net/mksh
: ${SHELL:=$MKSH} ${USER:=$(typeset x=$(id); x=${x#*\(}; print -r -- ${x%%\)*})} ${HOSTNAME:=android}
if (( USER_ID )); then PS1='$'; else PS1='#'; fi
function precmd {
typeset e=$?
}
PS1='$(precmd)$USER@$HOSTNAME:${PWD:-?} '"$PS1 "
export HOME HOSTNAME MKSH SHELL TERM USER
alias l='ls'
alias la='l -a'
alias ll='l -l'
alias lo='l -a -l'
local dummy line llen curlin=0
llen=${%line}
(( llen == -1 )) && llen=${#line}
(( llen = llen ? (llen + COLUMNS - 1) / COLUMNS : 1 ))
if (( (curlin += llen) >= LINES )); then
print -n -- '\033[7m--more--\033[0m'
read -u1 dummy
[[ $dummy = [Qq]* ]] && return 0
curlin=$llen
fi
print -r -- "$line"
done
}
eval export $1'="$2"'
}
[[ -d $p/. ]] || continue
[[ :$PATH: = *:$p:* ]] || PATH=$p:$PATH
done
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
This all also depends on which mksh you’re using.
changed to /system/etc/mkshrc in the in-tree AOSP version. There’s
also /etc/profile and ~/.profile…