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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. I'm looking forward to this phone, and it's (hopefully) hacking potential. I'd love to write my own scripts in $LANGUAGE to interact with the phone sensors. If it's built on Ubuntu, it should all be open to us, right?

I see that this page (http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/app-ecosystem) states that the apps are created with HTML5 or QML, but I'm hoping other languages are just an apt-get away. If so, they can have my money now.

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Read in some other HN comment that its just android underneath, so this would suggest that the normal apt-get route might not be an option?

There are two different projects. What you're talking about is the Ubuntu for Android.

iubuntu for android is just android underneath, this new announcement is a stamd alone os

To clarify: Ubuntu for phones can run using the android kernel (which is a modified linux kernel). This means that most of the drivers should work out of the box (graphics, wireless, etc) if you use this route. You can also use a normal linux kernel but the driver support could be more problematic in that case.

The difference is that Ubuntu phone has the ubuntu userland (which includes apt) where as a normal android phone has the android userland (dalvik, etc).

The nice thing about the ubuntu userland is that it will most likely allow you to use any compiler that targets ARM. This is interesting because it allows you to make native phone application using python, ruby, haskell, lisp, etc.

Another nice thing about the ubuntu userland is that it includes the gnu programs so it will be much easier to compile and use things like openssh than it is in android.

How different is the Android kernel from mainline? If it is just a case of drivers shouldn't they be able to easily merge them back to mainline as modules?

All the drivers (for recent hardware) are either binary or so ugly that mainline will probably refuse to merge them.

They mention writing crucial core functionality for apps in languages like C.

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