Linux on Dex
linuxondex.com
linuxondex.com
Need a kernel option or module not provided? Nope, can’t build/sign it. Remember, not all modules are for new hardware (no VMs for you!). Current version of OS? Distro security updates for kernel? Um maybe if they get around to it lol.
It kind of reminds me of Doctorow’s thing about war on general purpose computing.* Like how is it in the interest of handset manufacturers to let you have a general purpose computer that could run unsigned (by them) code?
To have a real linux distro, you would have to be able to run unsigned privileged code, but that would make it possible to do all sorts of naughty things like unauthorized disk encryption, subverting DRM, mucking around with the radios, etc. You can’t really have have one without the other.
* http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
It uses libhybris, so they're limited to the original kernel or something close to it because of proprietary drivers. But it's a community project since Canonical stopped Ubuntu Touch development, and it's had a desktop mode like this for years!
The PostmarketOS project is similar, with an explicit goal of mainline support where possible: https://postmarketos.org/
But yes, I would be much happier if devices had support in the mainline kernel and could run any distro you wanted right out of the box. (And some devices just straight up lock you out - I try to avoid those whenever possible.)
You and the author of parent comment should read about Librem 5 (it is supported by UBports as well as GNOME and KDE).
The problem is sandboxing schemes that put the device manufacturers' needs ahead of the device owners' needs.
Gate it behind a long 20-step procedure. Put a video of a guy repeatedly telling the user "hey, hey, this is bad, don't do this unless you're a developer and know why you're doing it, it's a bad!".
I mean really you don't even have to go that far.
Just give it an off switch.
Yes, you should be able to do some kind of override to say "yes I know what I'm doing and I accept the risks".
And... security twonks?
I'm on the lookout for a solid system that can boot a vanilla Linux kernel (something like an x86 laptop or ARM laptop, sub 10 inches preferably) that can make phone calls, receive SMS, and has a built in 4G modem.
Does such a thing exist? I'd rather have a crap phone attached to a powerful computer, than a powerful phone that locks itself down so much that it's a crap computer.
Also just looked at their computers that are beginning to resemble an actual alternative.
I remember another "libre" project some years ago which was very expensive and extremely clunky, probably because they wanted to use pre ME intel chips, which it seems they have compromised on now.
Anyway it's good to se alternatives catching up. I am so ready to ditch the big-data/fashion companies and i think many people are too, if just the design and eco-system catches up.
Personally i think we are less than 10 years from total dystopia if we don't create an "alternative" internet, which is actually just the standard internet without walled gardens, without tracking and with out corporate and state controlled ID systems that will end up imprisoning us all very soon with no escape.
I am from Scandinavia and here the state already tracks and cross references all kinds of data on you from health to taxes to criminal record, just as private big-data does in the US. Everyone has a state provisioned login card with serious sec flaws.
We are no doubt headed for china-like rating systems and pre-crime drone fuelled nightmares.
A large organisation that pushed both free hardware and software for the masses fast is sorely needed to avoid the ultimate tech nightmare that only the coming climate/resource collapse can otherwise save us from.
All hail either free private computing or a deus ex machina Carrington Event.
Odds are high you'll even be stuck with a 3.10 (or maybe 4.4 if you're lucky) fork of the kernel.
As much as I love the formfactor, it's way more likely that we'll see a mainline kernel running on one of the various Snapdragon 845 devices before the Gemini or Cosmos.
Maybe Sailfish OS?
Though it's not yet shipped, and software/drivers seems to be mostly a community effort.
Perhaps naïvely, I imagine that selling me hardware is in their interest. Is control of what runs on the hardware they manufacture really worth more than selling that hardware more widely? Granted, there aren’t a whole lot of us who want to run our own OSes, but we do exist. How much money do the manufacturers make by maintaining control?
Or do they keep it because of contracts (perhaps like HDMI or other copyright-monopoly-enforcing standards) requiring them to prevent users from owning their hardware?
Open up the bootloader and computers become commodities (modulo some special cases). The makers of those commodities become hostage to whatever platform becomes most popular on those computers.
Instead of thinking in terms of "freedom," one should think of this situation in terms of power.
If it wasn't for IBM's mistakes, all computers would be like Apple and the mobile platforms.
Ecosystem silos where everyone would be throwing away their ST, 500, Acorn, Apple, etc every time it was time to upgrade.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/DREVO-Wireless-Bluetooth-Mechanical-S...
I use my phone as my primary mobile computer (I don't own a laptop anymore) and am very happy with this setup.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Multi-Device-Mechanical-Rech...
And the buttons are in the right place (!)
Thank you.
BTW: dropbox is lame until you can use encfs over it ;)
I've been looking for such thing for a long time now.
If you have a corporate Job like consulting or something equivalent it's very likely you are packing an awful laptop with you everywhere you go, a DELL or a Lenovo or something like that.
DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.
I really hope Apple does something similar in this area , the new iPad can be connected to a screen, but the real deal would be using the iPhone with as a laptop...
Even when Excel , Chrome , Gmail take 30-50 seconds to open up ? And your laptop freezes when you are dealing with more than 10000 rows ?
That's your opinion i guess.
But that "Excel" thing might be an answer: the laptop must be running Windows, and Windows users often run an antivirus, and some Windows antivirus software is known to be terrible. (The MS-provided basic antivirus was always fine in this regard, though.)
Galaxy S9 has 2 X 4 Core @ 2GHZ , my corporate laptop has an i5 from 2015 with 2 @ 2GHZ.
I'll go with the Galaxy.
So Ghz is Ghz regardless of x86 or ARM as thisvis just the clock speed.
Another discussion is how much work is done each cycle. For that you might use GigaFLOPS or TeraFLOPS (10^9 or 10^12 dloating operations per second) or another absolute measure of performance.
All these things take way more energy, so your laptop will also have much bigger battery.
On the other hand, there are laptops, that have cellular radios. My old Thinkpad surely does.
Depends on what you're doing with these 10k rows, though.
it's like comparing the revs of your cars, it's just the cycle rate, not the Instruction rate
This seems a drastic response.
1. Take a nice shiny new laptop
2. Install Windows onto it.
3. Throw a large bucket of badly written monitoring apps, security apps, encryption apps, in-house apps, and pointless business notification apps.
4. Lock down the OS so the end-user can't remove or stop any of the added chaff.
5. Watch the nice shiny new laptop slow to crawl under the weight of all that crapware.
This is speaking from experience - I have 10+ years of designing and deploying corporate Windows based Desktop/Laptop builds. It all starts fine, until some clueless internal committee decide that they want to install everything and the kitchen sink onto your nicely designed platform...
The nicest thing about the Chromebooks is that the software is identical, but the hardware varies from $200 cheapo devices all the way up to almost $2,000. This means you are far more likely to find your own sweet spot of price, size, memory & cpu, storage etc.
Some also have LTE so can be used as an alternative to a phone.
Because of their dependence on Google servers, Chromebooks (or using any cloud-based service) make it very hard to satisfy confidentiality requirements that are imposed by clients for consulting jobs.
Remember, Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed. No-one actually wanted the core of their desktop inside their phones. People have partitioned off different use-cases for their PC and smartphones, and the overlap is smaller than designers think.
we are still in the mainframe/timeshare stage.
The PC revolution happened because of very open hardware specifications and a non-monopoly on the firmware (the IBM BIOS was reverse-engineered by Compaq).
Snapdragon's 835 changed that. So will the A12X from Apple.
But it's likely a greater chance to see a snapdragon head into a convertible desktop format than an iPhone or iPad, neither even allow a mouse. Still have hope for an A12X powering a MacBook tho.
I bought a Sentio Superbook, and my pixel is the only non-apple device I have so I can try to use it in this manner.
There are plenty of reasons for that, chief among them being the staggeringly-uphill battle of Windows regaining any significant marketshare in the mobile space and (presumably) the lack of software compatible with Windows on ARM.
Meanwhile, Android (and Samsung's phones in particular) are quite popular, and the vast majority (to my knowledge) of Linux desktop programs work on ARM just as well as they do on x86(-64).
People want desktops to run desktop software. Not WinRT/universal/modern/UWP. They did not understand this. So for multiple iterations, they shipped tablets, phones, etc., under the "Windows" brand that could not do what people think of when they hear "Windows".
They should have shipped a device circa 2012 that let you recompile desktop Windows apps for arm. They had the technology.
A jail's a jail, no matter how big, decorated and comfortable seems to be.
Backups will need to be good and easy if your main computing device can fall out of your pocket on the subway, and an OS which is happy doing this will need to exist. But for many people, this could be a beautiful world.
I want to be able to put my phone into that slot, dock it, and use the screen of my phone as the mouse pad for the laptop.
I want my phone to do all the processing and work. I want the laptop dock to be an extension of my phone, running something like DEX to make the laptop experience work. The only thing I want this laptop dock to do is give me a screen, a keyboard, and maybe extra battery and ports.
Please, someone make this happen. I could use my phone for all computing at that point.
It is still a concept, but Razer's two phones have been the same size, so it remains a possibility.
Is it just me or would something like that sell like wild?
Given how saturated the laptop market is, that's actually not terrible.
And most phones swing above chromebooks for price and power, no? This would be an improvement on the format if you ask me. Especially if it could eventually deliver a proper Linux distro or Mac OS.
Attempts have been made before, like the Asus Padfone line, but it never really caught on.[0]
Minus the hole, that is one of the many features of kdeconnect: Use your android device as a wireless touchpad and keyboard.
Basically, connect screen to get debian.
USB C hubs with power passthrough, 3 USB A ports, and an HDMI port exist too, so you could run the USB display, HDMI, and a keyboard and mouse all from a single USB C port.
It will depend on their port configuration and display link integration though. The HDMI port might try to claim the USB display bus or whatever, and I'm not sure if you can put multiple USB displays on a single port like that. One will definitely work though.
> * Phones should be connected to an external display to use Samsung DeX.
> * Selected Samsung HDMI adapter/cable is recommended to use Samsung DeX.
> * Samsung DeX using a HDMI adapter or cable is only available on Note9 and Tab S4.
------ So really, DeX only works well (with HDMI cable) on Note9 and Tab S4?
Does it work if you do that + use Bluetooth peripherals?
Also whether there'll be GPU acceleration or just framebuffer.
Can we play a 4k YouTube video out of the box in Firefox?
Also there's two SoCs. In most of the world there's a Samsung Exynos and in USA there's a Snapdragon.
There's surely going to be differences here. Especially GPU-wise.
"Only use authorized images provided directly through Linux on DeX. Other versions or unauthorized images may not operate properly."
Seems to imply, to me, that it is not impossible to run other images in this container.
A crappy distro on a couple of old devices? No thanks. I'll just wait for the Librem 5 [0]
0) https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Edit: Misread "Note9" as "Note7" (don't ask). Ooops. My conclusion still stands.
In any case, in terms of what you are capable of doing to your device (e.g. running Linux distros, controlling radios, etc), the Librem smartphone is years ahead of anything else in the market.
This is about your phone doubling up as a Linux PC and being able to use your phone as a PC seamlessly when required by simply connecting it to a monitor. This can be super useful for a lot of users.
Current 8 core SOCs with 4 to 8 GB RAM should be more than usable and its great Samsung has been trying to make this happen. And there is nothing 'crappy' about Ubuntu 16.04 especially given all distros are the same underneath. Why this name calling against Ubuntu?
Something a phone that supports running arbitrary Linux distros will naturally do without having to depend on random projects like this one which try to give similar functionality by shoehorning a Linux distro on top of a mobile OS. You're also at the whim of mobile OS 'manufacturers', who may make changes to the OS which then break the shoehorning effort.
> And there is nothing 'crappy' about Ubuntu 16.04 especially given all distros are the same underneath.
This isn't even remotely true. Here's a few ways distros differentiate from other distros: custom kernel patches (or not), custom patches (or not) for applications they distribute, package management (!!!), response time to security issues, support they offer (official, community, etc), upgrade model (rolling release vs big crap dump of updates every X months).
> Why this name calling against Ubuntu?
Ubuntu does a lot of the above differentiation stuff wrong, IMHO.
Quite a few people already have bought it.
> or support
Quite a few applications will run on it. Linux on ARM has been a thing for years... it's not like this is some walled garden bullshit 'ecosystem' that has to be painstakingly grown from nothing.
It's really odd to support manufacturers who create walled gardens in order to lock in customers and prevent users from actually owning the device they purchased.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-does-the-motorola-atrix-4g-lap...
Desktops and even laptops make sense exactly where phones don't: large screens, large keyboards, a lot of CPU and battery. This can't fit in a pocket.
The battery life like this is horrible though. I’m not sure if it’s X11 or if it’s that using android’s graphics from C wastes a lot of cpu time or what.
Another option is Maru:
https://maruos.com https://github.com/maruos/maruos
Maru is an open-source project and has been well-tested for nearly three years now. We've also been featured on HN quite a few times actually.
Speaking of Samsung, Maru already has early builds available for the Samsung S9: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru-os-dev/YVkUiwuKMRQ/fOQY...
I'm the creator btw.
I'm not spending $700 on a locked-down linux tablet with 4GB RAM. Unfortunately I don't think I will ever be at a point where a tablet is worth more to me than 440 double cheeseburgers.
IOW be prepared to find in the next 5/8 years PCs with Windows kernel and basic userland as a UEFI fw and "Linux" (GNU actually) software available and offered via Microsoft store. Also be prepared to find mobile devices dockable with the same offer from Samsung etc. The end of freedom.
That's is a clear demonstration of the need of mandate by law free software and open hardware: having free software is not enough if we do not have hw to run it directly.
I'm guessing they'll get the support with Android Pie where Samsung also promises that Dex will be usable without their special dock.
It's rare that I'll find a monitor and keyboard, but no PC.
I do look forward to the day when we all have phones that we can dock into terminals, but until that day comes my portable drive does the job pretty well.
So what is preventing OEMs from releasing a Chrome OS phone which runs both Android apps and desktop Linux apps out of the box without this Dex/Canonical vendor-specific solution?
I send SMS from the command line by curl'ing twilio ...
curl -X POST -d "Body=Hi" -d "From=3032221111" -d "To=4151112222" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/${account_sid}/Messages" -u "${account_sid}:${auth_token}"
Of course this means that your phone number has to be at twilio (either source the number from them or port it to them).
Only Apple seems to have got the control over the stack to get calls through iPad/macOS. I was hoping that Dell Connect would be an option but it's not clear that voice is pushed through there.
If you're on Google Fi, you can make (and take) phone calls on your desktop via Hangouts.
If Samsung could adopt native android installation, like some LG devices are, this is an exciting possibility.
Having owned the note 1, 2, 4 and now a pixel 2, I left because of the poor history of timely and current updates by Samsung.
If Samsung could provide the option of running native Android like LG is, this would be a compelling option.
Has anyone tried it? Does it work anyway, but just "unsupported"? Or do you get gated at the registration step?
> Linux on DeX currently supports one customized Ubuntu image (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS version provided by Canonical) which only operates on selected Samsung devices. (Note9 and Tab S4).
What a waste. Hardware vendors can never produce a really good piece of software. If something as humble as RaspberryPi can run fully up-to-date unmodified Arch I'm pretty sure my Note3 has all the hardware power to run it too yet they require a super-duper-recent device produced exclusively by themselves and would only let us run an almost 3-yr-old distro they have modified.
Is this a VM on top of dalvik? I assumed DEX was deprecated in favour of ART https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/gc-debug.html I mean it is still compatible bytecode (i think) but who knows anything about android roadmap anymore?
It's not related to dex/art of Dalvik.
Presumably someone in branding at Samsung thinks this makes sense. They might not even be wrong considering this is end user focused whereas .dex files are something only developers see.
Will Samsung have access to my data?
Does this have a SaaS cost model?
Will I have root access?
Can I apt-get install any package, or only selected packages?