Easily Try Ubuntu on Your Device

muapsein.blogspot.com If you know a bit about Android, you might have noticed that the OS is built atop the Linux kernel. The most important component in Android is the kernel, which is also a central part of every Unix-like operating systems. The similarities in the overall structure allow running Linux on Android devices, but some changes are necessary. We previously talked about the Ubuntu project by XDA Forum Moderator and Recognized Developer zacthespack, but now it’s time to showcase a different approach.

If you want to try out Ubuntu on your device, you should consider trying out chroot. It changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. Thus, a program that is run in chroot can’t access files outside designated directory tree. XDA Forum Member userdelroot used chroot when he created a script to install Ubuntu directly on your device.

The script creates a proper image and downloads the necessary files to your device. All you need to do is to copy it to the location mentioned by developer and run it as root. The development is still at a very early stage, so there might be some inconveniences here and there. So far, the method has been tested on the Nexus 7 (2013), but it is likely to work on most other devices as well.

To find out more about the project, head over to the development thread.

[Update: CONFIRMED!] Google Preparing to Sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 Billion

muapsein.blogspot.com - Update: An official press release on Google’s sale to Lenovo can be found on Google’s Investor Relations page. And according to the PR text, the acquisition is aimed at Motorola Mobility’s product portfolio, whereas Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of Motorola Mobility’s patents as well asProject Ara. The full text can be found at the bottom of this article.

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Back in August of 2011, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for the princely sum of $12.5 billion. This largely seemed to come out of left field for many observers, as Google has only released a handful of self-branded products. This lead many to believe that the primary reason for the acquisition was Motorola’s patent portfolio.

Now two-and-a-half years later, we’ve all seen that Motorola’s patent portfolio wasn’t exactly the magic bullet that many initially thought would save Android from a draconian patent-trolling doom. Instead, Motorola has been hemorrhaging monetary losses ever since its acquisition, dragging down Google’s bottom line and making many wonder why Google paid so much for the ailing division in the first place.

Now, it seems as if Google is in late-stage talks with China-based Lenovo to transfer ownership for $2.91 billion US Dollars. As a reminder, Motorola still holds over 10,000 mobile communications patents, so perhaps Lenovo is looking for these to bolster its own tablet and smartphone portfolio. In any case, if the rumored acquisition and figures are true, this sale lends credence to the notion that Google vastly overpaid in the $12.5 billion acquisition.

Lenovo and Google have both declined to officially comment on the matter. But according to ChinaDaily, Lenovo has stated that it s readying an announcement regarding a “major acquisition.

What are your thoughts on Google’s potential sale of Motorola to Lenovo? Does this prove just how much of a mistake the initial acquisition was in the first place? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

[Source: ChinaDaily, NYTimes | Thanks to my friend Raja for the tip.]

Google Investor Relations Press Release:

Lenovo to Acquire Motorola Mobility from Google

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Mountain View, California – January 29, 2014: Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) today have entered into a definitive agreement under which Lenovo plans to acquire the Motorola Mobility smartphone business. With a strong PC business and a fast-growing smartphone business, this agreement will significantly strengthen Lenovo’s position in the smartphone market. In addition, Lenovo will gain a strong market presence in North America and Latin America, as well as a foothold in Western Europe, to complement its strong, fast-growing smartphone business in emerging markets around the world.

The purchase price is approximately US$2.91 billion (subject to certain adjustments), including US$1.41 billion paid at close, comprised of US$660 million in cash and US$750 million in Lenovo ordinary shares (subject to a share cap/floor). The remaining US$1.5 billion will be paid in the form of a three-year promissory note.

Lenovo, which in 2005 acquired IBM’s PC business and its legendary PC brand, will now acquire world-renowned Motorola Mobility, including the MOTOROLA brand and Motorola Mobility’s portfolio of innovative smartphones like the Moto X and Moto G and the DROID™ Ultra series. In addition to current products, Lenovo will take ownership of the future Motorola Mobility product roadmap.

Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention disclosures. As part of its ongoing relationship with Google, Lenovo will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property. Additionally Lenovo will receive over 2,000 patent assets, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio.

Motorola Mobility enjoys outstanding brand awareness around the world, and is currently the #3 Android smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. and #3 manufacturer overall in Latin America.

“The acquisition of such an iconic brand, innovative product portfolio and incredibly talented global team will immediately make Lenovo a strong global competitor in smartphones. We will immediately have the opportunity to become a strong global player in the fast-growing mobile space,” said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. “We are confident that we can bring together the best of both companies to deliver products customers will love and a strong, growing business. Lenovo has a proven track record of successfully embracing and strengthening great brands – as we did with IBM’s Think brand – and smoothly and efficiently integrating companies around-the-world. I am confident we will be successful with this process, and that our companies will not only maintain our current momentum in the market, but also build a strong foundation for the future.”

“Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola Mobility into a major player within the Android ecosystem. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere,” said Larry Page, CEO, Google.

“As part of Lenovo, Motorola Mobility will have a rapid path to achieving our goal of reaching the next 100 million people with the mobile Internet. With the recent launches of Moto X and Moto G, we have tremendous momentum right now and Lenovo’s hardware expertise and global reach will only help to accelerate this,” said Dennis Woodside, CEO, Motorola Mobility.

The transaction is subject to the satisfaction of regulatory requirements, customary closing conditions and any other needed approvals.

Android Preparing to Become a 64-bit OS, ART Will Replace Dalvik as Default Runtime Compiler

muapsein.blogspot.com - Android has become the major player in mobile operating systems, practically ever since Gingerbread was released. The little green robot has evolved from a small, niche operating system into something of a juggernaut. During the course of these years, Android developers have added tons of handful functions like JIT and ART compiler. Now is a good time to think about the future of the Android, as a few major events are already behind us and some very interesting things are starting to pop up in the Android source code.

For those of you who follow the changes on Android’s Git, news that our favorite OS will go 64-bit isn’t exactly anything new. A few commits in platform/system/core and frameworks/baseindicate that Google has already started the process of transforming the OS. Those commits were pushed by Google’s employees, so it is safe to consider them “official.” This move should not be a bit surprise, as Apple already released a product with the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. Apple’s iPhone 5S doesn’t fully support 64-bit architecture, but Google has plenty of time to make software adjustments to make Android compatible with newest ARM processors. 64-bit Android has been already announced by Intel to support their new Atom Bay Trail CPUs this coming Spring. Intel-based devices are a relatively small percent of the market, so the timing will most likely wait for ARMv8-based processors instead. It won’t happen in a month or two, but first units should be presented in the second quarter of this year.

What changes will 64-bit bring, and why we should we be excited? For starters, this will bring support for greater than 4 GB of RAM. And although PAE theoretically allows for greater than 4 GB of addressable space on 32-bit processors, individual apps still are limited to far less. It can be expected that we will see flagship devices from Samsung, Sony, HTC, and LG ship with 4 GB of RAM when this support is live. At present, “4 GB” is just a number, as most apps won’t use it. The greatest Android applications are quite small and consume less than 100 MB of RAM. 4 GB can be used by some high end games in the future, but perhaps other market forces will limit this. Personally I think that manufacturers should focus on improving the battery life instead of packing more cores, more RAM and more of everything into their top devices in this specsheet war.

Another benefit will be the support for a more optimized 64-bit instruction set in the case of ARMv8. However, application developers will need time to add some architecture-related tweaks to their projects, and this will obviously take some time. Going back to the first AMD64 (x86-64) CPUs on personal computers, it took several years before they were commonplace enough to be considered mainstream. We shouldn’t expect anything different in Android’s open ecosystem.

ARMv8 won’t be much better on day one than ARMv7. In time it should dominate the market, but first devices shouldn’t really differ in terms of performance. This platform still needs a lot of work and optimization before we can consider it stable. It’s almost sure that first flagships with Android supporting 64-bit will show up at the beginning of 2015 as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 planned to be released in the second half of the year will still support only 32 bits.

Another interesting thing to note is that the next version of Android despite breaking root, will also use ART compiler as its default runtime compiler rather than JIT. We will present additional details about ART in an upcoming story, and in the meantime you can check the commit detailing the change in default runtime compiler. It appears that Dalvik will be available as an alternative, so those of you who use Xposed Framework can sleep well from now until Xposed is updated to support ART.

Many changes have occurred in Android recently, and hopefully more will happen in the coming months. One thing is sure: We’ll be sure to keep you informed of all of the interesting details!