<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-2" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> 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: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.damonkohler.com/2008/12/python-on-android.html">http://www.damonkohler.com/2008/12/python-on-android.html</a> 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: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars">http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars</a> 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: <blockquote cite="mid:5c5e5c350906152311r531887f4t2c9c58810a02209b@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:33 PM, NoiseEHC<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:NoiseEHC@freemail.hu"><NoiseEHC@freemail.hu></a> wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">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 </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> 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. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">(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. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> 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. </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>