Android TV x86 released. Repurpose your old pc

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/15/2020 at 10:07 AM, jagdtigger said:

AFAIK it doesnt emulate anything, android is linux based which means with some work it can be ported to anything and run natively.

Android is UNIX based....... 

 

(and can be *fully* controlled without using a keyboard or mouse ever, something Linux yet has to achieve...) 

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

Android is UNIX based....... 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

Quote

Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software,

 

[Guest]

Just use Kodi?

[Mark Kaine]

9 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

 

Well, shit I just looked this up yesterday... 

 

 

Guess I should have clicked the link because there it says "linux".

 

Anyway my point was more you can control android without ever using a keyboard or weird sudo commands... 

 

Not sure how drivers are handled tho tbh, are they just pre-installed or could you change them somehow? 

 

On the other hand if it just works you don't need to install drivers ever?

 

 

[Nayr438]

19 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Anyway my point was more you can control android without ever using a keyboard or weird sudo commands... 

 

Not sure how drivers are handled tho tbh, are they just pre-installed or could you change them somehow? 

 

On the other hand if it just works you don't need to install drivers ever?

Drivers have to be compiled into the image at build time. Once the image is built that's it. Android is designed to be built io a per device basis. It's what makes Android x86 projects die out so quickly. The more drivers and blobs you add, the more unstable it becomes. If you were to install this and look at the logs, you would see it flooding with error messages for hardware that doesn't exist on your system. Not to mention that there is no official x86 support outside of a few Intel Atom CPUS, if they are even still supported. Same goes for graphics. Most ports or translation layers for these drivers perform poorly and are generally very incompatible with the system in general. While Android itself uses a Linux based kernel, it's not directly compatible with anything built for Linux.

[jagdtigger]

3 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Drivers have to be compiled into the image at build time. Once the image is built that's it.

Nope, linux is highly modular. Including how it handles drivers, usually as kernel modules. As the name suggest these modules can be added and removed at will without the need for a full recompile. The only thing that is re-generated is the image but nothing gets compiled (minus the driver if you only have sources but thats a different story).

[DarthEoin]

I have android tv on my tv and its fine, although you would think it would have good app support it dosen’t and you can get pretty much all the apps that are on it on any other device. Plus all the apps appear to be designed for an idiot and missing so many different features it is easier to just not use it

[Salv8 (sam)]

4 hours ago, cikeZ00 said:

-snip-

i fucking knew something was off!

[bcredeur97]

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Well, shit I just looked this up yesterday... 

 

-snip-

 

Guess I should have clicked the link because there it says "linux".

 

Anyway my point was more you can control android without ever using a keyboard or weird sudo commands... 

 

Not sure how drivers are handled tho tbh, are they just pre-installed or could you change them somehow? 

 

On the other hand if it just works you don't need to install drivers ever?

 

 

I'm thinking things say that just because it's inclusive. 

If you have a Linux based OS, it is effectively a UNIX based OS, because Linux was derived from UNIX.

That said, we know iOS is very different from android even though both are UNIX-derived. If you really get into the nitty gritty and open a terminal app/window on them (which requires a jailbreak on iOS to do lol) you start to pick up on some of the similarities. 

[strajk-]

Why should I bother with this?

It's cool but what problem does this actually solve?

If I want an application to watch TV on, I have Kodi, so I don't see the purpose of having Android TV on x86, plus comparatively x86 systems are a lot more power hungry than ARM, which is actually a legitimate concern for places like Portugal that have very expensive electrical bills due to most of the electricity being bought abroad or being produced with renewable alternatives (80% if I'm not wrong).

 

In places like Switzerland?

Yeah sure, electricity is cheap as fuck here because we're the country in the world that per capita has the most Nuclear Powerplants.