12jan12

= 12 January 2012 LUG meeting notes =

We held our first GNU/Linux User's Group meeting of the year 2012 on Thursday 12-January. Our topic for this meeting was Tablets using the Android GNU/Linux.

Android Tablets present at meeting
We had 4 Tablets presented that we played with:
 * Two separate 'Chinese' tablets, one with Android-2.2 (from Eugenio) and the other with Android-1.6 (Manfred borrowed from Paul Thompson)
 * Blackberry Playback (from Manfred) - running Playbook-2.0 which purportedly is a QNX based OS
 * Asus Transformer (my tablet) - running Android 3.2.1

They were of varying screen sizes and varying interfaces.

None of the Tablets were root'ed and so not having full permissions it was not possible to access the full GNU/Linux capabilities of those Tablets that were of the Android OS.

Android on x86 platform
We had some discussion on Android on the x86 hardware platform, where I noted I had managed to get Android-3.2 and Android-4.0 installed in Virtual Box running under openSUSE-11.4 (and 12.1) but I had failed to get the Virtual Box network working with this 'virtual' Android. Without a Network connection to an Android OS, applications can not be easily installed and the OS's utility is limited. There are .iso files of the various Android versions that can be downloaded here: http://www.android-x86.org/download

Android OS update philsophy
It was noted it is NOT a simple matter to install Android on a piece of hardware, because it is often not possible to obtain the necessary hardware drivers that need to go with any given Tablet hardware (and its implementation of the Android operating system). For example, I am expecting Android-4.0 to be pushed from Asus to the Asus Transformer at the end of January this year. But that update needs to come from Asus and given the possible problem with hardware drivers, it would be dangerous for me to use the above Link to install an Android update. Plus I think that I would need root permissions to update the OS myself (which I don't have, and I'm currently not keen on 'rooting' my tablet). Hence I plan to wait until Asus update the Tablet's OS.

Alternate booting methods for Android tablets
It was noted that for some tablets (such as the Asus Transformer) it is possible via a certain power up/volume control hardware sequence, with a USB device connected, to get the Tablet to boot to grub boot manager, and then to the USB device (as opposed to the Tablet's SD card). But that is not something that we explored in the meeting.

2012 Club Admin/Executive discussion
Our discussion on the club executive for 2012 was very limited. I'm happy for someone else to take over the 'presidency' for 2012 and also willing to continue for another year, as the responsibilities thus far, given our limited membership, is small (basically organizing meetings and writing the annual report for SAC). So if there are any volunteers to replace me as president, I'm most happy to let them do the job instead of me. We did suggest that the organizing of various meetings could be shared amongst our group and it need not be me to take the lead for this everytime [ie anyone in the Group could organize a GNU/Linux User's Group meeting].