Comments on: X11 on Android

By: Brother Phil

Brother Phil — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:36:30 +0000

One use for this could be to ssh to your home machine, and run programmes on there, piping the graphics back to your phone. You could maybe have a dashboard app – mail checker, media control, etc, either as an extension to your PC desktop, or for a headless PC, such as a remote for a myth box.

By: milkkart

milkkart — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:34:02 +0000

possibly using something like DMX you could join the X server on a PC and the one on your phone so you could drag a window between the two screens, can really think of a specific use for that really other than as a (LAN) party trick though.

By: gturtles1

gturtles1 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:02:29 +0000

hey guys i have recently done this and its fairly simple i am just 13 and managed to pull it off i have installed icewm on it and it is fast but the only con is you cannot see the theme or backround but i also figured out that any app or anything mostly you download or install in the debian shell gets imported into the desktop its really easy and neat kool trick to show your friends i might release a video so check my youtube channel youtube.com/eleshakys1

By: Dwight Hubbard

Dwight Hubbard — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:46:43 +0000

Has anyone considered running Maemo mer this way?

By: carlos

carlos — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:41:13 +0000

x11 what can i do with this

By: Simon C. Ion

Simon C. Ion — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:31:45 +0000

@stu:

I’m not sure that I understand what a full screen desktop app is. Could you elaborate?

Also, I think that you misunderstand what X11 is. X11 is not a widget toolkit. X11 is not a window manager. X11 is not a desktop environment. X11 is what provides the underlying mechanisms that make all of those things work.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:12:53 +0000

Hmmm.
Whilst this is a great little experiment, X11 is not at all suited for mobile devices. M$ are still learning that lesson with Windows Mobile – when they started with WinCE, they decided to use the same look & feel as the desktop OS, incl teency weency buttons / sliders / boxes, on screen keyboards etc. coupled with thin on the ground device drivers in favour of the CPU generating all the gfx (bad idea).
X11 would turn out the same – ‘maybe’ a decent Window Manager might help but its still stuck with the underlying X11 code base that was designed for full screen desktop apps from Day 1 – not optimised in the slightest.
Interesting none the less though.

By: max wooden

max wooden — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:34:05 +0000

Very awesome! Now we can run eagle on the Android! Perfect for designing pcbs on the go!

By: Konpaku

Konpaku — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:53:57 +0000

sweet, I was waiting for something like this to pop up. debian/android together is a cool combination, and will only become more sweet when a driver is scrapped together to give it native x11 support. Thanks for all the work.

By: Mark Walker

Mark Walker — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:31:18 +0000

In response to the above post. This is x11 running nativley on the device, but in order to get around the fact that there are no drivers available, I setup a vncserver locally then connect to it (locally).

So it is running natively. My original post, if you read it, does make this clear.

http://www.androidfanatic.com/cms/component/fireboard/?func=view&id=1615&catid=9

By: gman16k

gman16k — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:36:51 +0000

this looks like simple vnc running on the android phone. if that is the case, choosing the title ‘X11 running on android’ is a bit confusing. while this is interesting, its not as technically impressive as running x11 natively on the device. good luck doing that and keep trying.

By: Erik

Erik — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:09:50 +0000

Guess you would want to run matchbox on it or something similar

By: mike

mike — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:44:36 +0000

cool hack, but I dont see how any x11 wm (without serious design changes) could be useful on a tiny screen. there needs to be a new mobile wm that is meant for this, with features like automatically “full-sizing” each window you bring to focus, easy context switching, multitouch (where possible), etc.

By: Cossist

Cossist — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:16:18 +0000

It looks like the G1 is running android, has the debian shell, and is VNCing itself for X11.

By: burnliff

burnliff — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:02:37 +0000

so wait, is this vnc or an actual linux desktop, i’m confused.