[Lilug-dev-sig] Android and Linux

[Chris Knadle]

On Wednesday, December 15, 2010 10:11:31 am robwilkens at gmail.com wrote:
> Last night before the general meeting, I believe it was Mike C. and I were
> talking about (briefly) whether or not Android was Linux...  I did a quick
> search to find where I saw hints that it was...
> 
> Here is that link:
> 
> http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html
> 
> says
> “By default, every application runs in its own Linux process.”
> “By default, each application is assigned a unique Linux user ID.”
> 
> All on the first section in the document, so that tells me that android
> _IS_ linux with some additions.
> 
> I don’t know that much about android otherwise, but developing Java apps is
> fairly straightforward so writing apps for android is easy enough at least
> with eclipse (which I’m using on Windows, though is available on Linux).
> 
> -Rob

Keep in mind that the name "Linux" technically refers only to the Linux 
kernel.  In that sense, Android is "Linux", however if you think about what a 
"normal Linux box" is, Android wouldn't fit that description because it uses a 
very different system past the kernel.

And while Google has a reference Android distribution, typically this is not 
directly usable on Android phones because the phones have customized hardware 
requiring the kernel to be custom patched for each device model.  This is why 
you see so many application vendors online complaining about "fragmentation" 
of the Android platform -- because this is making it very difficult to make 
generic applications that will run on all of the Android phones.

There was a good presentation about Android at MHVLUG in June, and the 
presentation slides for that are available.

   http://mhvlug.org/content/android

  -- Chris

--

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us