I guess I'll just have to live with Linux in Android. I'm sitting here with a VNC connection to my phone fiddling in Eclipse trying to install the Android development stuff (on the phone itself).
I don't know much about Android (and don't want to) but it seems like you could hook their drivers and use them. It's possible (I think) to install a new Android version without getting into hardware specifics, that stuff is abstracted much the same as X, it just picks the right driver by probing and runs. I remember when X wasn't that automatic. I had in mind a screen with maybe 8 buttons. What the labels on the buttons say and what they do is context sensitive. At an outer level you might click camera or gps then all the buttons would get redefined to things that were appropriate at that level. There'd be a back button, maybe a home button, maybe a text box for input. The labels could be defined in xml (since most people seem to love that) and the actual programs could be just little executables, it's not all one program. You could define ls and top and df buttons (for example) and those would run in a window with a back button. At some level(s) there'd be a common set of parameters that would get written out on a command line to the executable. I don't know anything about differences in arm chips, how different my pi is from my phone. They both have gpus. The phone's a dual core and faster than the pi. >From what I've seen most of Android seems to be written in Java. I've had some experience with it but it's slow and complicated, and permissions might get in the way. I did non-gui automated data entry in Java for about a year at work feeding an Oracle database where we didn't have rights to do SQL directly. I just ran evtest under Linux and I can see touches, drags, etc. on the screen, with coordinates, also presses on the phone's 3 buttons. On 2/15/15, Nick Holland <[email protected]> wrote: > short answer: no. > Long answer: still no. Too many types of hardware, too little > documentation, too much churn (i.e., by the time a machine was "done", > new hw wouldn't be available for purchase), most hw has a finite life > (i.e., embedded batteries -- once those fail, your machine is mostly > worthless), etc., etc., ... > > IMPOSSIBLE? No. I just can't see this as something that someone is > going to spend a lot of time on. Feel free to prove us wrong, write > code, make it work, submit it. > > But yes, I know what you are saying. In 1981, I spent a lot of time > trying to optimize a 33 byte program to 32 bytes so I could fit it in an > on-board ROM on my Quest Super Elf. I've been terrified to go back to > that program and look to see how my codes skills now compare to when I > was 15 years old. > > (Hmmm....not at all what you are after, but maybe someone could write an > armv7 emulator in the Android OS so you could run an off-the-shelf > release of OpenBSD in as a VM in Android? I can't decide if that could > be in the slightest bit useful or not) > > Nick. > > > On 02/15/15 12:46, Alan Corey wrote: >> I'm not talking full control of all functions, I just mean putting an >> image into an sdcard partition and being able to boot it from Android >> and use it. Hopefully be able to build at least some ports on it. >> >> OK, I'm new here. I've had a Raspberry Pi for maybe 2 years, run >> Debian on it but I've played with FreeBSD on there. I've been running >> OpenBSD on i386 machines since about 2001. >> >> A few weeks ago I got an Android phone (my first), added a 64 gig >> sdcard, installed Debian. Frankly between Android and Debian I'm >> getting sick of the bloatware. 20 years ago I was plinking around >> teaching myself i386 assembly language and writing programs that were >> under 100 bytes. Android Studio is almost a 1 gig download and they >> recommend 4 gigs of RAM to run it. >> >> This Debian doesn't even have direct access to the hardware, you >> communicate with it by ssh and vnc. Can there be X video drivers, a >> way to attach gpsd to the GPS hardware, use the Android keyboard, >> connect to the WiFi, bluetooth, USB, camera, and sensors? I'm not >> sure what I want but I feel like I don't have access to the hardware I >> own. An OpenBSD dmesg would be a good start. >> >> Alan Corey >> > > -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
