[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2009-06-15

[NoiseEHC]

I think you do not get what is so "special" with Android.

1. They killed the braindamaged X driver model and put the driver where 
it belongs, the kernel. Just like Windows NT and OS-X already did. 
Finally it is fast and really supports hardware acceleration! Did I 
mention that it has redraw profiling tools?
2. Python is already available on Android:
http://www.damonkohler.com/2008/12/python-on-android.html

The "porting" is not about running Python Sugar on Android but to 
implement the parts missing from Android in java.
a. Activities store their data into a per activity file area and an 
SQLite instance. A common data publishing interface should be defined. 
The Journal should became just an aggregation.
b. There is no peer to peer networking. I should be written. 802.11s 
will be dropped in XO 1.5 anyway.
c. There is no common document format defined to share data between 
activities. Work is already happening on this one.
d. There is no printing support. Hmmm, I have heard this before.
So IMHO the job would not be to port Python since the lame Python VM 
would be just as lame on ARM. If you really want to port things then 
here is the thing:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars

Of course this is just the (easier) technical side. The people side is a 
totally different beast.

Currently, as I see, both OLPC and Sugar developers spend a massive 
amount of time fighting platform problems when the solution is already 
available. This time could have been spent on learning activities. 
Desktop application compatibility does not exist on the XO so probably 
it would not be a deal breaker. The next big thing which will be 
reimplemented is touch screen support in XO-2. I hope that the result 
will be just as usable than the next Android GUI for smartbooks which 
will be tested for years by then.

Of course it will not happen overnight but can it be that this is the 
most future proof investment? Is not the goal putting education into 
children's hand rather than reimplementing the desktop paradigm over and 
over again when there is an alternative backed by Google, the ARM 
vendors and millions of $?

Elena of Valhalla wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:33 PM, NoiseEHC<NoiseEHC at freemail.hu> wrote:
>   
>> The real deal is that Android will be pushed by all the carriers and ARM
>> vendors. In my humble opinion it will be the dominant phone OS in the
>> future with even more hardware support
>>     
>
> the good thing is that android is based on the linux kernel, so most
> of this hardware support will be available to every linux system; the
> only significant exception will probably be the graphics subsystem,
> where google's work will stop at the framebuffer, while a standard
> linux system may need X.
>
>   
>> (just try out the Android SDK, it
>> is multi platform with an emulator). Jumping to this massive smartbook
>> bandwagon could push the OLPC idea further without any hardware development.
>>     
>
> It is probably feasible to jump on the smartbook bandwagon even
> without a full port to Android: a proof of concept port of sugar to
> ARM is already available from the work of Bernie Innocenti in
> OpenEmbedded, and in my free time I'm trying to update it to 0.84;
> another (untested?) port is available in debian, where the sugar
> packages are built for every supported arch, including ARM and other
> embedded ones.
>
> Installing such systems on an android phone is generally feasible,
> requiring skills broadly comparable to those needed to jailbreak an
> iphone; of course deployment will need support / permission from
> whoever is going to sell the hardware, to be able to preinstall
> gnu/linux + sugar instead of the standard system.
>
>   

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