Will this be possible?

sirbassknocker wrote:Will this be possible?

If you are referring to Plasma Active as alternative launcher running on top of Android: At some point probably yes.
However, the Qt port of Android has to mature first.

What I'm wondering more, is if it would be possible to root the device and install mer/Linux+plasma active on top. I want my Linux desktop, but the Nexus 7 hardware looks really nice for the price...

Not possible I think, because of the missing drivers (such as X.org or Wayland for the GPU).

Couldn't X11 be setup by manually configuring /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the graphics module already being used by the stock kernel that Nexus 7 uses? Similar to what is done with other nVidia drivers that don't support hotplugging and XRandR?

I am confused.

The Mer project mentions on its site that it isn't focused on the hardware adaptation. (Meaning the kernel and hardware driver modules?) Which implies Active Plasma isn't involved with the hardware adaptation layer either. Does it matter to the stock kernel what init executable (/init or /sbin/init...) it runs to start processes? X server is one of those processes with the Active Plasma boot sequence. The display should be abstracted away so X server doesn't care about the graphics hardware as long as the kernel can interface with the graphics module?

However, implementing Plasma Active, seems to me, to always require compiling a custom kernel...true? This I don't understand.

I think I understand it a bit more...Android is a more of a fork of a Linux kernel: not a fully compatible Linux kernel...whatever that entails.

http://www.androidcentral.com/linux-kernel-33-released-android-support-almost-complete

and

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/How-Much-Linux-Is-in-Android

I assume Google made enough changes to the Android kernel it broke X server's Linux port. In order for Active Plasma to work on a device a Linux kernel (not Android fork) needs to be compiled. The rub seems to be that the hardware driver modules also require re-compiling for the new Linux kernel. However, those are proprietary and only distributed as binaries for the Android kernel, not the Linux kernel.

A sad state really. Plasma Active only really runs on 2 ARM tablets then? Point of View TAB-TEG-10-1-4GB-3G and Advent Vega.
http://share.basyskom.com/plasma-active/nvidia_tegra2.html

These are old Tegra 2 devices and not newer Tegra 3 devices like Nexus 7.

Wait until Vivaldi tablet will at last come out.

About Android - it's graphics stack architecture was incompatible with normal Linux from the very start, therefore Android drivers are useless. There are some efforts to bridge them:

https://plus.google.com/113386402913695 ... LF6atjc455

Hey guys!
As Canonical finally made a dedicated version of Ubuntu for Nexus 7, I think Plasma Active running on it is a possible dream!
Just think about it
Android on a tablet is useless for me. But a Linux distro on it could be the top! Moreover with a Plasma Active desktop!
Does it exist a Plasma Active version for Ubuntu???

You should be able to, if you're willing to mess around with the kernel a little bit. For some background, I'm posting this from my TF101 (Tegra 2) which is running Debian.

Android kernels are perfectly capable of running a Linux distro, the only catch is that you need to recompile them with a different config and there may be some bugs or missing functionality. Hardware acceleration is usually where the problems start, because you need X drivers this (usually binary blobs).

You're lucky in that the Nexus 7 is a Tegra 3 tablet. Nvidia has a proper Linux 3.1 kernel (not Android) with X drivers for hardware acceleration (google Linux4Tegra). All you have to do is merge in the hardware-specific stuff from the Nexus 7 Android kernel and you're good to go.

juju_des_highlands wrote:Hey guys!
As Canonical finally made a dedicated version of Ubuntu for Nexus 7, I think Plasma Active running on it is a possible dream!
Just think about it
Android on a tablet is useless for me. But a Linux distro on it could be the top! Moreover with a Plasma Active desktop!
Does it exist a Plasma Active version for Ubuntu???

Kubuntu has a 'tech preview' release of Kubuntu-active (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-activ ... l/release/). I've seen a photo of someone having it running on a Nexus 7 in the UDS, but I'm not sure what effort is involved and how well it works. That said, if ubuntu runs well on the Nexus 7, you should be able to find repositories that'll let you pull in plasma active packages and have it run as your main DE without (hopefully) too much trouble. The question is how well do the *buntu plasma active packages work as far as user experience goes. If you do try, report back!

Edit: wow! it actually looks really easy to slap ubuntu on your nexus 7 nowadays: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/Installation

Thanks for all your answers very helpful!
However I finally decided to bbuy a Nexus 10 instead of a Nexus 7.
I just hope there will be an interest for it as for Nexus 7 from developers...

rdnetto wrote:You should be able to, if you're willing to mess around with the kernel a little bit. For some background, I'm posting this from my TF101 (Tegra 2) which is running Debian.

Android kernels are perfectly capable of running a Linux distro, the only catch is that you need to recompile them with a different config and there may be some bugs or missing functionality. Hardware acceleration is usually where the problems start, because you need X drivers this (usually binary blobs).

You're lucky in that the Nexus 7 is a Tegra 3 tablet. Nvidia has a proper Linux 3.1 kernel (not Android) with X drivers for hardware acceleration (google Linux4Tegra). All you have to do is merge in the hardware-specific stuff from the Nexus 7 Android kernel and you're good to go.

Usually Android kernel (i.e. including Android drivers) can't run normal Linux distro, because those drivers are built against bionic C library, which is incompatible with glibc which normal Linux uses. So Android drivers are usually worthless for these cases. Nvidia's Xorg drivers for Tegra 3 are indeed useful. Is that's what Canonical are using?

There are some images for Tegra 2:

http://share.basyskom.com/plasma-active ... egra2.html

I didn't know anyone made some for Tegra 3.

It seems to be possible indeed. So are Basyskom planning to publish any ready images for it?

I get my nexus 7 to run plasma-active on a ubuntu installation. but i don't know why, it does't respond to any touch, I know the touchscreen works because it does in unity and normal plasma-desktop but for some reason it doesn't work on plasma-active :S

Here a photo taken from my cell phone.

Nice to see.
Are there other show-stoppers (not supported hardware / ...)?
=> if this would be solved, would it be usable? (already tested with keyboard / mouse maybe...)

Thanks for showing this