[LAU] iPad and Linux audio

[carmen]

"Linux is Linux, Android is blahblah blah ... never the twain should meet."

Maemo, a 'fork' of debian is closest "mobile" OS to normal linux + userspace shipped so far (by NOKIA, now abandoned for WindowsMobile)

despite 'mostly' open, it's a birds nest of interdependencies with the proprietary bits, eg blobs for hardware decoding of mp3 implemented as a gstreamer plugin, an old kernel you cant upgrade without losing significant 'fence drop' drivers and firmwares that arent in vanilla linux, forget about upgrading your pulseaudio so you can stream audio to a real set of speakers (the version it uses is too old to talk to the one in Debian/Ubuntu/Arch/Gentoo/Fedora). even if you install a debian chroot, apps will magically 'poof' since the xorg versions are about 3 years seperated and maybe its just me but i always find X unstable with mismatched client/server versions. your microSD cards are formatted on post-2.6.30 btrfs? good luck..


so theres enough annoyances just as a user who wants to compile/run 2 decades worth of linux audio software on this device due to it being a frozen-in-the-past fork mainly due to the driver situation, that when looking at Android, which threw out everything above the kernel in favor of a quasi-java, and doesnt even have a standard libc, let alone the likelihood of being able to run jackd, pulse, Xorg for apps written in GTK/QT/Tk/FLTK/WX...sure people using chroots to debian and Android VNC-clients to virtual-desktop X servers running without a physical display.. but thats too much tweaking and indirection and hacking around the real problem for my tastes

wel you can hopefully see why i'd never vote with my dollars for an Android device. i fully welcome you chasing after users and $2.99 app sales and struggling with a fence-drop NIMBY/NIH OS's limitations if that's you thing though