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Everything Else => Zaurus Distro Support and Discussion => Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums => Archived Forums => Android => Topic started by: scholbert on January 15, 2008, 04:34:27 pm

Title: General Question
Post by: scholbert on January 15, 2008, 04:34:27 pm

Hi,

i got a simple and maybe dumb question  :

Is the goldfish swimming inside the zauri or does android run native using an abstraction layer?

scholbert

Title: General Question
Post by: speculatrix on January 15, 2008, 06:23:29 pm

Quote from: scholbert

Hi,

i got a simple and maybe dumb question  :

Is the goldfish swimming inside the zauri or does android run native using an abstraction layer?

scholbert

android runs "on the metal" so to speak, the QEMU image was for an arm5 processor and linux OS, which happens to be close enough to the Z to make it a replacement for the qemu virtual machine.

now, android is a distro so it expects things to be in certain places, so either you install it replacing your normal Z distro, or you use a "chroot" environment to allow it to see the files where it wants yet not break the host operating system.

HTH
Paul

Title: General Question
Post by: scholbert on January 16, 2008, 05:35:46 am

Hi speculatrix,

thanks for the information!

I just read the short story you pointed at, in another thread:

Quote

five problems with google android:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.c...le-android.html (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.c...le-android.html)

Nice article  !

Am i right, when i say, that all the goldfish stuff in the android diffs for zauri kernel could also be left out (because these are only virtual drivers for the emulator)?

In other words, when i make sure that android will find its system interface on a platfrom, it'll be ready to run...
So basically only dirty hacks to the device's kernel will be needed  

Correct me if i'm wrong!!

Regards,

scholbert

Title: General Question
Post by: speculatrix on January 17, 2008, 05:41:36 pm

Quote from: scholbert

Am i right, when i say, that all the goldfish stuff in the android diffs for zauri kernel could also be left out (because these are only virtual drivers for the emulator)?

In other words, when i make sure that android will find its system interface on a platfrom, it'll be ready to run...
So basically only dirty hacks to the device's kernel will be needed  

Correct me if i'm wrong!!

Regards,

scholbert

er, as I see it, yes. Cortez' installable is a chroot environment, so that his poly/debian/angstrom zaurus is really a glorified boot loader, and then android runs with its own file system (CHange ROOT you see). So, rather than emulate devices in software for the benefit of developers, you simply need to make the zaurus's hardware conform to what android expects to see by setting up the device drivers correctly in the kernel to have the required API; luckily linux is quite good for this sort of thing.

Title: General Question
Post by: jpmatrix on January 19, 2008, 08:26:08 am

another question:

how can i switch from opened applications ? (alt-tab) ...