Inferno OS Running On Android Phones 109
New submitter Digi-John writes "Employees at Sandia National Labs have put the Inferno OS on Android-based phones, replacing the default Java UI. Applications are written in Limbo rather than Java. The full announcement is at the bitbucket repository, and a short video demonstrates some of its capabilities."
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, but it was just not impressive. Seems to me Android has more interesting visuals in its robotic fingernail than Inferno on mobile has.
It is a start, not something complete -- we all need to start somewhere. You don't need a lot of imagination to see that once they attract more developers then they may get something that can provide true competition to Android & iOS.
But: why would anyone bother when they have a choice anyway ? Applications written using Limbo seem nice & small, small is good on something like a mobile 'phone. Probably lots of other reasons -- but I don't know enough about it. I was a little concerned to see that the GUI is based on Tk, this is quite old, will it be up to the job for the high quality graphic apps that some people want ?
Whatever: competition is good!
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck fancy visuals.
The idea in Inferno is that your phone, your desktop, the cloud and your mate's computer are all the same file system space. You can copy data between all these devices, seamlessly, securely and quickly. "Data" is anything represented as a file, so that's music and documents, your phone's cpu, speaker and microphone, or even the applications your currently running on your desktop.
Plan9 and Inferno are about addressing networking and adding operating system support for it. The developers don't consider modern OS as networked. This is a project to make every computer attached to the network, as far as the user is concerned, the same computer, and the idea is to do it at the OS level, not the browser.
You want the yet to be programmed Inferno equivalent of Office on your phone? It's there. Not just as an installable application but that instance you have running on your desktop right now is also available to you on your phone via an exported file system either to stream over the network or you could just copy the running instance...
Fuck fancy visuals.