Canonical’s Ubuntu to Support Google Android?
During the Ubuntu Developer Summit (May 25-29, Barcelona), Canonical’s Netbook team is set to show Google Android applications running on Ubuntu, according to sources that will attend the conference. Here’s why Canonical is so intrigued by Google’s mobile operating system.
Let’s start with Android’s momentum:
- Google Android now runs on 1 million to 2 million smart phones and other mobile devices, estimates Newsfactor.
- Android sales are expected to grow 900 percent in 2009 vs. 2008, predicts Strategy Analytics.
- Android is expected to debut on consumer netbooks around July, reports ComputerWorld.
- And Dell recently demonstrated Android running on a Mini 10V (though Dell has not announced plans for Android support).
Meanwhile, Canonical continues to promote Ubuntu in the mobile world, including Ubuntu Desktop Edition (for PCs and notebooks), Ubuntu Netbook Remix Edition and Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). By the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 in mid- to late-2009, the netbook market in particular could face intense competitive pressures between Google, Microsoft and Canonical.
Opening Arms to Android?
Officially, Canonical has no comment on Android developments at UDS. But the company seems to be developing a strategy to ensure Android and/or Android applications run on Ubuntu — or to ensure Android applications port easily to Ubuntu.
In fact, Android will be a key topic of discussion at UDS — an event where Canonical and attendees will focus mainly on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) development goals.
According to an Ubuntu Loco Team member who plans to attend UDS, at least three sessions at the Barcelona event will focus on Android compatibility and strategies. Adds a source close to Canonical, referring to the Ubuntu-Android work: “We’ll share some screen shots/demos [at UDS]. I have no comment on it though — it’s just something we’re playing around with, which is what UDS is about.”
To be sure, Android is only one topic within the broader UDS universe. Adds another Canonical source, Software Partner Manager John Pugh: “UDS is all about defining the key projects for the next release, in this case, Karmic Koala 9.10. There are a number of areas teams are working on…my specific interest is the Ubuntu Server and cloud.”
Stay tuned for more UDS coverage throughout the week.
Follow WorksWithU via Indenti.ca, Twitter and RSS (available now) and our newsletter (coming soon).
WorksWithU on Identi.ca
WorksWithU on Twitter
WorksWithU's RSS Feed
What would be really nice is if canonical get involved in the development of the moblin project and probably create an ubuntu spin of moblin. I’m not too carried away by all the obsession with android. The only thing linuxy about it is that it runs the linux kernel, it doesnt use the Xserver ruling out the possibility of running traditional Linux based applications. Moreover Android was built as a mobile phone platform trying to port it to netbook might be stretching the possibility too far, one would need to create hosts of 3rd party applications to meets lots of netbooks centric needs. It would be better and cheaper if major distribution rally round Moblin which is a Platform built specifically for netbooks, well optimized for the Intel Atom ( which powers over 90% of netbooks) and comes with very sleek interface which would sure win mainstream users. the added advantage is that moblin is essentially a of remixed gnome, so traditional linux applications can run on it which would mean netbook users can make use of the rich linux application ecosystem.
just my 2 cents
@bigbrovar
while moblin uses X server, you have to take into consideration that it was from intel (well optimized for intel atom) thus by default hardware company tends to not like it whereas android from google (software company) tends to please hardware company and not just because intel has 90% of the market does mean you have to use the software they created. Now that intel had given moblin to linux foundation, i still dont think it will take-off. This is actually a smart move by canonical, in the sense they could cater both traditional linux and android at the same time.
I am interested in seeing how Canonical’s support for Android applications in Ubuntu is going to proceed. Whether its Moblin or Android it really doesn’t matter. Ultimately companies support projects run by reputable companies that are in it for profit. The reason is predictability. The assumption is that Google and Intel are in the business of making profit and make forward looking decisions to that end. In other words it ensures the integrity of the supply chain/vertical market. Imagine what would happen when either one of chip makers, cell phone makers, software makers, cell phone companies, distributors fail. Well, the proverbial house of cards topples.
If it wasn’t apparent before, it should be clear that the survival of the netbook/MID/UMPC market lies in the evolution of a whole new way of interfacing with these new systems. The conventional PC UI has failed as is evident in the rates of return of netbooks (windows and Linux), failure of the Windows-based OQO, and other small form factor devices.
Moblin’s interface is a little like the famous OLPC Sugar interface, will be replaced by the conventional Fedora 11 interface in the future via first boot options. Mobilin UI is well suited to smaller screens but the question is not the UI but the applications designed for that UI. Android is here now and it has lots of Google’s billions behind it.
Android has been well received and continues to evolve. The natural convergence of computing devices into the cellular network space means additional dollars for all. It all makes sense; Polished practical Android apps that are network aware on a 3G enabled Ubuntu netbook/notebook.
monmonja@ never said it wasnt a good move, i just feel for the mobile platform, effort should be on android. but when it comes to netbooks moblin is just the future. The Linux Foundation now directs Moblin and even though most of the developers working on it are Intel guys its still very easy to to compile a port that would run on non Intel/atom based architecture.
The Development process of Moblin is more open to the public compared to Android, It already being built with Technologies and libraries that exist in the Linux ecosystem (Empathy, Bluez, Pulse Audio, Clutter,gupnp SyncEvolution, KMS, Nautilus,etc)The benefit to any improvements made to these libraries in the development process of moblin would trickle down to the traditional linux desktop and already Novell is now part of the development team, it would be really nice if canonical were to joins in to develop an ubuntu spin.
It would be more work porting android to netbook (something originally made for mobile phone platform and which cant run existing applications in the Linux ecosystem) Than adopting Moblin as the default netbook standard
In the near future, I can imagine virtually all mobile devices (MIDs,netbooks,notebooks,…) including smartphone electronics (3G, GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc.), for the simple reason that there are a lot of great applications that can be built to leverage it. The ability to make phone calls & send SMS is likely to become important, as well (especially for mobile operators).
Android already supports all of the smartphone hardware & has great apps that use it, so integrating Android with Ubuntu & Moblin would bring that functionality to those platforms as well.
Perhaps it would make more sense to develop an X Server extension for Android that could be enabled through a simple configuration setting, or build option. Then, ANY Linux distribution could integrate their desktop with Android.
Thanks for the feedback, folks. The Moblin conversation caught my attention. I agree Canonical has to develop a strategy for Moblin. Canonical and Intel announced joint MID work in 2007, but it seems like most of Intel’s recent MID work involves Moblin and I’m not sure what that means for Canonical’s own Ubuntu MID efforts. I’ll be back with more Canoniocal/Android/Moblin thoughts as I track news from UDS.
-jp
Editorial Director
WorksWithU
I think a gang of cross compatible Linux based OSs stands a better chance of standing up to Microsoft than any of them have on their own.
At any rate it’ll be interesting to see where Canonical and Google take this.
Android userspace execution environment on top of Ubuntu isn’t the thing to watch. You can run Ubuntu userspace on Android with some fancy chroot tricks as well. Are OEMs going to be impressed by that? No the real issue is chipset support. Android flat out does it better on ARM based chipsets.
The real issue is whether or not Ubuntu is going to integrate Android specific linux kernel patches into the Ubuntu kernel. There is going to be some tension there between the kernel team and the mobile team. The Ubuntu kernel team has been making noises about taking a much harder line stance about trying to keep downstream patches out of the Ubuntu kernel…
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/specs/KernelKarmicRemovalOfNonUpstreamedCode
The real issue here for Canonical is ARM support and getting Ubuntu supporting ARM adequately enough for OEMs building ARM based devices to be able to rely on Ubuntu as a pre-installed target platform.
When the ARM based chipset manufacturer’s like Marvell are going to conferences and demoing Android on their chipsets…without anyone from Google being their to help them demo Android…that says something significant about where Canonical is in the race…they are not in the lead.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/ARMBeijingSeminar2009Report
“Although there is no Google guys to talk about Android, Freescale, Mavell and Thundersoft demoed Android. I have to admit Android caught more eyes than us. People asked about our ARM netbook product/solution and business models. Because of some hardware issue of Freescale babbage rev1.0 board, the performance of Ubuntu on Babbage (compared to Android on Babbage) is not very good. Android demos runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon/8xxx, TI OMAP3, Freescale Babbage and Marvell PXA3xx.”
If ARM based devices are where the netbook formfactor is headed…Canonical is well behind Google when it comes to supporting the family of ARM chipsets. How the hell did that happen? If Canonical really is focused on netbooks how did Google out perform them in the emerging ARM netbook market? Maybe the reality is, Canonical has really no idea what they are doing.
Making binary compatibility with Android a near term priority, in order to ramp up Ubuntu ARM support quickly may come at a significant cost in terms of kernel level manpower, as Android is not moving nearly as quickly in terms of kernel adoption as Ubuntu is. Integrating the ARM specific patches from Android into the newer kernel Ubuntu is targetting for Karmic may take more work than Canonical has on hand in their kernel team.
It will be interesting to see how Canonical digs themselves out of the hole with regard to ARM support with limited manpower resources at their disposal. If they had staffed their kernel team correctly to make an ARM device push, they’d not be in the hole now. But the only way to get out of the hole and reach hardware support parity with Android maybe to up their kernel development staffing commitment. But can they do that quickly enough to influence the choices the major ARM OEMs? If Canonical takes too long, OEMs can’t wait for them, they’ll make a commitment to ship Android. It seems its now Android’s market to lose and the ARM devices haven’t even started shopping up on retail shelves yet.
-jef
Aikiwolfie: So far I think the Ubuntu-Android work is being driven by the Ubuntu community and Canonical. I’m not sure if Google is involved.
But I must concede I need to do more reporting to get a better feel for which parties will be involved over the long term.
Also, I think it’s safe to say the Android-oriented demonstrations at UDS are merely proof of concepts. Canonical hasn’t made any official announcements, though I suspect work in this area will continue.
Packaging, integration and a remix of Moblin are also subject of two sessions at uds.
Wouter: Thanks for the info. Curious to know: Do you think Moblin will help or hurt Canonical’s Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) initiative? Seems like Intel and folks like Novell are paying serious attention to Moblin, and I wonder if that has distracted some folks away from Ubuntu MID…
Joe:
The history of Moblin is itself worth really taking a closer look at. Canonical was actually much more involved in Moblin v1.
http://www.umpcportal.com/2007/09/922
http://blog.canonical.com/?p=13
Then something “happened” and intel decided to re-orient moblin v2 using rpm based packaging instead…and as a result of that started making use of OpenSuse’s build infrastructure for image building.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/moblin_reworked/
Personally I think there some yet to be told story about the thawing of business relationship between Intel and Canonical concerning the evolution of Moblin. I’d add the word scandalous, but since we are talking about technology companies the reasons for the separation is probably far more practical and sobering tallying of ROI than it is scandalous.
If Moblin2 ends up being more successful in terms of building a contributing community to move the platform forward, without close involvement of Canonical whereas moblin1 was not a success even though Canonical was more involved..what does that really say about Canonical’s ability to build and lead a strong vibrant open community?
-jef
I think it’s good that ubuntu is expanding. If they create a mips version they will be ready for that market, if android then that market and so forth.
I think canonical seems to be making that niche it wanted, needs and somewhat got. Afterall, you can now go dell w/ubuntu …
@ Jef Spaleta
Integrating the ARM specific patches from Android into the newer kernel Ubuntu is targetting for Karmic may take more work than Canonical has on hand in their kernel team.
Jef, you mentioned that the Android kernel is slow moving and that it has very good Arm support. Why hasn’t the Android work on Arm Linux entered the main kernel tree? Is Google keeping the patches out of tree or has the kernel team rejected Google’s work? (I’m not up to snuff on kernel stuff).
In an ideal OSS setting these patches should already be in the main tree and Canonical would get them “for free” by using the next upstream kernel. It has me wondering what is going on here.
“Jef, you mentioned that the Android kernel is slow moving and that it has very good Arm support. Why hasn’t the Android work on Arm Linux entered the main kernel tree? Is Google keeping the patches out of tree or has the kernel team rejected Google’s work? (I’m not up to snuff on kernel stuff).”
Google just has a lot of code and Linux kernel people don’t like to swallow a big chunk in one go, instead preferring to integrate improvements in a series of smaller patches. Google has been working on that. This is going to take sometime.
Ronald,
Yes..wouldn’t it be grand if Canonical got everything for free. They do their best work when someone else is doing the heavy lifting of actually writing functional code.
The android.git.kernel.org tree exists and is public. Things are being mainlined as a matter of course. Things are slightly more complicated in that the arm port of the linux kernel isn’t exactly the same as the mainline codebase that gets talked about most frequently. Linux for ARM is a port, and that porting effort has its own development processes. The “mainline” kernel itself doesn’t target ARM as far as I am aware. Just like MIPS, ARM support is a “port.” It shouldn’t be taken as a forgone conclusion that ARM specific bits will show up in the mainline kernel tree that linus manages as his tree doesn’t try to be the one tree for all possible hardware targets.
These are all nuances…the main point is that the Android devs are doing their work against kernels tagged as stable and not the latest kernel. Canonical may have to forward port some things into the kernel that karmic ends up using or deliberately hold their ARM kernels back and use exactly what android is using.
The question remains however… why is Canonical so far behind android in terms of ARM support? They knew ARM netbooks were going to show up. They even rolled out a press release trumpeting the fact they were going to start working on ARM.
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/arm-linux
Canonical sold itself in that press release as being the company that could help OEMs bring product to market the fastest. What happened? Why aren’t they living up to the press release performance promise? How long can the ARM OEM netbook market wait for Canonical to get into gear on ARM platform support? Google isn’t Xandros, Canonical is going to have a much harder time swooping into the ARM market later in the game and trying to displace Android like it did by coming into the intel netbook market months after Xandros/Asus.
-jef
Who cares if Ubuntu can run Android apps if they can’t get sound and video right?
I know they are trying to spread out and grab market but when simple things dont work it just makes Linux and Ubuntu look bad.
For instance, Netbook remix. I like it, think its a slick idea but on my MSI Wind U100 it runs like crap. The worst of it being that when I switch between full Desktop and Netbook Remix Desktop from there on out the machine is almost un useable. Its so bad on the video and sound front that I would rather use a hacked version of Mac OS X because its more stable.
They need to step their game up.
@jef you really should pay attention to all of the detail instead of picking out bits and pieces to satisfy your insecurity. Details exist on the Moblin/Canonical move just as details exist on all of your other tirades if you would simply read both sides of the story vs. making up your own.
Dell shipping Ubuntu on everything now and HP using Ubuntu for it’s line ups are not by chance. Android with Ubuntu isn’t by chance either, it is innovation coming to light. Patience. There will be plenty more of these items coming to light. You will have plenty more opportunities to rant.
JP:
Patience…did the ARM Seminar summary exude a tone of patience?
When Moblin moved from the Ubuntu kernel to a fedora kernel and switched from .debs to rpm packaging format..was that done out of an abiding patience?
You want to call my analysis crap..I’m cool with that as long as you make a real effort to point out why its crap. Feel free to substantiate an alternative interpretation with authoritative information. Feel free to point to counterpoint factual information instead of innuendo and buzzwords. If I have the details wrong point it out specifically.
-jef
Yes, Canonical is working with Intel to support Moblin v2.
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canoical-commits-ubuntu-moblin
I think Canonical is smart to cover as much bases as possible. I also think they are working on an ARM port. Things seem to be jostling amongst the various platforms available but I hope Ubuntu will survive it.
Joe,
Thank you for all of the wonderful information you’ve provided regarding W7. For all of the up to date information on all things W7 related, including Netbook issues, it’s best to view them directly at the Windows 7 support forum. The site will also give you all sorts of useful information, such as the “what’s new in the RC” feed….or you can also use talkingaboutwindows.com as an additional resource
Thanks,
v-glferg@microsoft.com