Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
Baglady
Nancy Mauro-Flude is a performance artist who has used mobile Linux as part of a device intended as an artistic and political statement. The Baglady device is a purse with a numeric keypad on the outside. Inside, it contains a Linux-based system with wireless networking. A camera and microphone have been discreetly placed on the strap. When enabled, this device captures pictures and audio from its owner's travels, then immediately uploads them to a remote server. It allows its owner to capture the events around her, perhaps in situations where recording devices are not appreciated or allowed. The immediate-upload feature ensures that the data gets out, even if the device is discovered - at least, in places where an open access point is available.
The subversive possibilities of such a device are clear; so are the potential privacy problems. Nancy was clearly aware of those issues, but, arguably, has not worked through them completely. Others will certainly follow this particular artist's lead; expect to see more mobile devices which record their immediate environments and put the results on a server for all to see. It is going to be interesting.
Ubuntu Mobile
Canonical's David Mandala gave a well-attended talk on Ubuntu's efforts in
the mobile arena. Like other such projects, the Ubuntu Mobile
effort faces challenges beyond simply making the distribution run on mobile
systems. Mobile systems truly are different, and, as a result, a user's
expectations of the operating system are quite different. Small screens
are a problem; not all applications have been written to function well when
the amount of screen space is limited. Touchscreens complicate things
further; David issued a challenge to developers to find ways to allow more
space in menus so that fat-fingered users can use them on touchscreen-based
systems.
The Ubuntu Mobile effort is actually two related projects: Ubuntu MID (for small, tablet-like devices) and the newer Ubuntu Netbook, aimed at larger devices. The Ubuntu MID work is currently based on GNOME Mobile, though David suggested that things could change at that level. In particular, he said, the Qt license change has stirred things up a bit. There is a selection of applications which are optimized for small screens. The distribution as a whole is intended for original equipment manufacturers; it is not expected that users of MID devices will be installing their own distributions.
MID systems typically use a touchscreen as their primary input device. Netbooks, instead, combine a larger screen with a real keyboard; that leads to different requirements. The Ubuntu Netbook distribution uses the full GNOME desktop - for those applications which behave well on an 800x600 display, at least. This distribution should be available in stable form at the end of the Jaunty development cycle.
David seemed to be having the most fun, though, with the new Ubuntu ARM port. One does not normally think of the ARM processor when one ponders netbook devices, but it seems that ARM is making a real effort to enable products in that area. As part of that work, ARM is working with Ubuntu to have a proper distribution ready. This effort seems to have gone pretty well; at this point, the full Ubuntu distribution is available for ARM systems. The biggest difficulty, it seems, is that ARM-based systems lack proper video acceleration. Canonical is working around this issue, though, and plans to support this port along with the others.
It seems that Canonical sees a bright future for the ARM port. While there are a number of systems available for x86-based devices, there is no real competition to Linux on the ARM processor. Windows does not run there. Symbian does, but it is not a true desktop-based system. So, any ARM-based netbook devices which appear on the market are sure to be running Linux. Canonical is doing its best to ensure that they run Ubuntu in particular.
Poky Linux
An alternative for small systems is Poky
Linux, a system put together by Opened Hand prior to its recent
acquisition by Intel. Poky Linux is, in fact, two different things: it is
a system for building Linux-based platforms, and it is also the
distribution which is that system's output. Rob Bradford, in his
presentation, acknowledged that this naming practice may lead to some
confusion. Still, while Poky may suffer from some ambiguity, its
developers seem to make up for that with enthusiasm.
Poky Linux started as a fork of the Open Embedded platform. The developers tossed in a bunch of tools which are useful on small devices: the Clutter desktop work, GeoClue, the "Sato" user interface, the Pimlico personal information management system, GStreamer, WebKit, etc. The result is a fully-featured distribution which is well tuned to the small device environment. Perhaps the highest-profile use of Poky Linux is in the Vernier Labquest device.
Rob discussed at length the build system that was created to allow the creation of Poky Linux distributions. There are a lot of tools there which make the task relatively easy, and which, as Rob pointed out, are well suited to people who do not like to type very much. More information on how that works can be found on the Poky Linux site.
What the audience really wanted to know, though, was Intel's intentions for Poky Linux, which it acquired with Opened Hand. Though Rob didn't say so directly, the real answer appears to be that Intel doesn't have much interest in Poky Linux and is not putting resources into its further development. So, says Rob, while the infrastructure is still in place, Poky Linux has become a community project. The future of this project, it seems, is in the hands of those who use it and wish to see it continue.
Android
GeunSik Lim gave a talk outlining the internals of the Android system. Much of that talk is not amenable to summarizing here, though there were useful details which will help as your editor digs more deeply into that system. One thing that jumped out, though, was this: Google decided to create its own C library for this platform. The size of glibc was part of the motivation for this work, but the real reason, it seems, is that Google doesn't want to have GPL-licensed code running in user space. They worried, perhaps, that glibc could go to GPLv3 in the future; that, of course, would make it impossible to use in a locked-down device. So they started with a BSD-licensed libc which was then tweaked extensively for their needs. The resulting library (called "Bionic") has some big gaps (no support for C++ exceptions, for example), but it evidently suits the Android platform well.
In summary: mobile Linux is clearly one of the hot topics for this year.
There are a lot of people and projects working in this area, doing no end
of interesting things. It is going to be fun to see what our community
comes up with.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Conference | linux.conf.au/2009 |
Posted Jan 21, 2009 19:01 UTC (Wed)
by xav (guest, #18536)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:25 UTC (Thu)
by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295)
[Link]
Posted Jan 22, 2009 6:01 UTC (Thu)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link] (4 responses)
(I've never seen WinCE, so no idea how it looks like. Probably like Win98.)
Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:13 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Windows CE is totally different from desktop Windows! It has quite
different API (there are common Win32 subset shared between Windows CE and
Windows NT - but it's surprisingly small). Windows CE has ton of
applications designed for PDAs and cellphones, but nothing for desktop. And
it's kind of pointless to have Windows will all associated problems if you
can't even use Windows applications!
Posted Jan 23, 2009 1:54 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 23, 2009 22:16 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2009 21:42 UTC (Thu)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
I guess that's why some of the smaller laptops have WinCE with Vista.
Posted Jan 22, 2009 12:57 UTC (Thu)
by alonz (subscriber, #815)
[Link]
I suspect the actual issue is the lack of open device drivers (or specifications) for the accelerators available in these chips.
Posted Jan 22, 2009 13:48 UTC (Thu)
by ufa (subscriber, #56005)
[Link] (1 responses)
How can it be? OpenPandora is ARM based and have full OpenGl compliance.
Posted Jan 29, 2009 22:39 UTC (Thu)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
Based on few posts Google found:
Does the 3D HW work well with X11? Is it stable? Does it perform well
For games it might be fine to (re-)write your UIs in OpenGL and work on
Posted Jan 22, 2009 23:32 UTC (Thu)
by robster (guest, #4849)
[Link]
Poky certainly isn't being discontinued as the git log and the mailing list indicate. During my talk I actively highlighted the community aspects to indicate that Poky is not purely a commercially motivated project but rather something that is successful beyond any single organisation. It was definitely not my intention to state that Poky was exclusively a community project. I had several people come up to me after the talk to discuss what steps they needed to take to get Poky up and running on their devices: they obviously believe that it is worth investigating.
Posted Jan 25, 2009 23:53 UTC (Sun)
by jlokier (guest, #52227)
[Link] (1 responses)
On a system with shared libraries, the LGPL imposes virtually no requirements on the app's licensing. With static linkage, there are requirements but they aren't all that onerous and don't require disclosure of app source code.
So if the GPL is being used as a reason to avoid Glibc, that's spurious nonsense. Somebody is peddling FUD.
If size is the reason - very likely - why didn't they use uClibc like a lot of small embedded systems use? That's LGPL too, but tiny compared with Glibc.
And if uClibc wasn't ok - why not newlib which is the other commonly used free library for these things?
(I say this as someone who did write my own libc for a big application once, so I'm not entirely unsympathetic.)
Posted Jan 29, 2009 16:56 UTC (Thu)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link]
Google walks a fine line, generally preferring the corporate-friendly
Posted Jan 30, 2009 12:13 UTC (Fri)
by forthy (guest, #1525)
[Link]
To be honest, as free software person, I'm not interested in locked
down devices; whether they run WinCE or Linux is irrelevant. Locking down
a device with Linux on it is already against the spirit of the GPL, and
AFAIK Harald Welte managed to "unlock" a Siemens router some years ago
with the help of a court and GPLv2, so at least in Germany, it seems to
be against the letters of the GPLv2, too. Android at least gives developers a chance to get an unlocked device,
so at least it is not that bad. But the business model of both handset
makers and telcos is anti-competitive, and therefore unethical. With the
exception of France, legislators don't seem to understand that.
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
Regarding Poky being 'discontinued'. Take a look at the git log. Intel are still contributing.
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
[disclosure: I work for Intel but this 'checking a public commit log' isn't exactly secret science']
WinCE runs on ARM
WinCE is not even Win98!
WinCE is not even Win98!
You are right, of course...
Win98 doesn't run modern MS Windows apps
either.
And
that's why systems capable of running Win98 are thrown away - there are
more Linux systems then Win98 system in most countries! Some are not so
modern and are still using Win98-capable stuff (Office XP, etc) - these are
used. Where programs incompatible with Win98 are common - there are no
Win98...Point being, some version runs on ARM. No idea how hard
it is to port a modern version to ARM though, surely they got enough money
and manpower to do it.
They can port it to ARM but they can not
port all the applications - and Windows without applications is useless...
WinCE is not even Win98!
nothing for desktop.
With WinCE you get 10h of use, with Vista no use-time, but you get the
applications. To ease the pain, you can switch at run-time between these,
but their UIs look completely different. (To me that sounds more
nerd-bile than mobile Linux.)
I wonder why the claim that ARM devices lack video capabilities, when practically every ARM system-on-chip out there includes video acceleration; from the the Samsung S3C6400 application processors (used e.g. in the iPhone) and the TI OMAP3 (used in the Palm prē), and down to smaller chips like the Zoran APPROACH5 (used in the LG Renoir). In fact, since the target market for these processors is mostly high-end mobile phones, they practically have to include support for 3GPP video (up to, and including, H.264 video).
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=42678
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=50933
(does it support e.g. HW acceleration for Xrender (composite), Xv etc)?
top of a framebuffer, but who wants to do that for e.g. Firefox?
Especially if you could run only one application at the time, and because
the OpenGL driver is a proprietary binary blob, you cannot properly debug
your application crashes.
Mobile Linux at linux.conf.au
Android's own libc
Android's own libc
hidden changes to the library itself in the future (or tightly integrated
plugins, which would still run afoul of the LGPL) to implement
digital restrictions management.
"open" side of things and shunning "free". After all, their largest
deployment of all, by far, their datacenters, run a heavily modified and
nondisclosed stack, and they are immune to the requirements of the GPL
because they do not redistribute. They are violating no requirements,
but let's not confuse ourselves about where their political orientation
lies -- like all companies, it is directed first and foremost towards profit.
Locked down devices