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Comment by jablan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they went for Android instead of some light Linux distro. Not sure what's the point of having Android on a huge LCD.

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Android is a light Linux distro. My coworker next to me has demonstrated running Firefox on it.

I would imagine odds are pretty good you can hack this thing to put your choice of distro on it in the end.

Except you can't really run Linux apps on it easily, since most of them will want X, or at least the GNU libc--and Android has neither. It's a pain in the ass.

it goes both ways - if you put linux on it, it doesn't have dalvik or whatever it is that android apps need to run. not everybody wants to run X apps, what's a pain in the ass for you is a great feature for somebody else.

Certainly--but someone buying an Android device thinking "it runs Linux" would probably be disappointed. Linux is there, but from the perspective of the average user it might as well be a custom kernel or even the Windows kernel, because without "surgery" and tweaking, you'll only be running applications built for the Android stack.

I've chopped out the Java layers of Android and run my own software on there, but it took some work to get my application running with the Bionic libc and the Android-specific devices.

People's perspectives are interesting. For me most Linux apps means command lines and daemons. X is rarely wanted ;) but yeah GNU libc and rest of shell "runtime" I would be very sad without.

They said it also runs Ubuntu, and will run the Windows 8 ARM version. Android is good for a low power CPU like ARM since it doesn't require as much horsepower. I would imagine that running a Firefox browser on Ubuntu under ARM would be a pretty painful experience compared to running Android.

FWIIW, I have a Marvell OpenRD[1] system running a "normal" RedHat XWindows environment (have not had a chance to switch it to Ubuntu/Debian yet). It runs great, including firefox.

[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdudetails.aspx

How painful was this to get? The website looks a bit schlocky but I am intrigued.

I got it over a year ago so my memory is fuzzy. IIRC, I got it directly from Marvell as an eval board. My employer actually bought it - I gave the purchaser the web site link and it showed up a week or so later.

There are lots of possibilities between Android and Ubuntu, Lubuntu[1], for example. Also, there's a bunch of Webkit based browsers in Linux ecosystem, no need to push it with Firefox at all. Even something like Puppy Linux[2] would be more useful than Android IMO.

[1] http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://puppylinux.org/

> Android is good for a low power CPU like ARM since it doesn't require as much horsepower

What are you basing this on?

I guess if that LCD can handle touch then it'll be just a big tablet where Android is more useful.

IIRC HDMI is one-way and touch-screens send touch information back via USB or some other connector. I can't see any wording in the specs that implies this has USB host capability, so unless I'm wrong there it it wouldn't be able to doe touch that way.

The HDMI connector has I2C on there. You could use that to communicate with a touchscreen and other peripherals. Since the display acts a slave only you would need to actively poll the screen all the time for touch events, but it's not that much overhead.

You could do it over bluetooth, but at this point you're making a specialized display and you may as well just plug into the Cotton Candies USB port to both power it and pass in the touch screen HID data.

You could send back touch events over the HDMI audio return or Ethernet channels.

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