[Gambas-user] Gambas in a tablet. Is it possible?

[Rob Kudla]

One way you could get a virtual keyboard and mouse input is to use one of
the Linux installers available on Google Play (preferably a free one; I've
never heard a good recommendation for any of the pay ones) and access the
Gambas app using VNC. In the past, users getting Gambas apps to be useful
on Windows desktops have configured VNC servers to only serve their Gambas
apps, and Android VNC viewers generally have virtual mouse and keyboards. I
think most of the Linux installers set up VNC by default as a way to access
Linux desktop apps from the Android side.

Running an Android X server app in conjunction with one of those Linux
installers would be another option, probably a cleaner one, but that's one
I haven't tried. I've had clients in the past who ran Linux desktop apps on
a terminal server and displayed them on Windows desktops this way. Ethernet
connections made doing that feel like they were running natively. Doing it
on the same host, as you would be in this case, should be faster still.
It's possible to set a Gambas up as a display manager, allowing you to make
it full screen and feel a little more like a native app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.darkside.XServer

Running Linux in a chroot (as many Android Linux installers will set up for
you) will probably give you far better performance than a virtual machine
as long as you have a device with multiple cores. The only advantages a
virtual machine would give you in exchange for the performance hit would be
the lack of a need for a separate display app (if the virtual machine you
choose has a virtual keyboard -- the ones I'm seeing on Google Play
currently don't, but you could always install "onboard" on your virtual
Linux box or build a virtual keyboard into your Gambas app) and it
shouldn't require root, which the rest of these solutions all would.

As you can see, there's no easy turnkey solution, but a number of
possibilities. Personally, I'd go with something like Phonegap, which just
uses Javascript/jquery and HTML, if I wanted to write Android apps (at
least the kind of app I would have used Gambas for on the Linux desktop)
without dealing with Java. You can even put them in Google Play if you want.

Rob


On 2013-10-31 09:28, Jose Monteiro wrote:
> Thank you Rob, for your quick reply.
> 
> A Virtual Machine as one of the possible solutions, you said? 
> Interesting, but I guess free RAM would be a bottle neck. I could test 
> this, for sure.
> 
> If a full Ubuntu ARM installation could preserve the touch screen 
> functionality AND the virtual keyboard, this software is completely 
> possible.
> 
> Maybe I need to think a little harder about it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thursday, October 31, 2013 9:31 AM, Rob Kudla 
> <sourceforge-raindog2 at ...94...> wrote:
> 
> On 2013-10-31 04:43, Jose Monteiro wrote:
> 
>> Is it possible to install Gambas over Android?
> 
> If you install an Ubuntu chroot or virtual machine, sure, just apt-get 
> it. None of the toolkits are optimized for touch but I assume Ubuntu has
> done something to make Gtk touch-friendly for their stuff, since tablets
> are one of their target platforms. So maybe it'd work with some 
> judicious app design.
> 
> But there's no native Android Gambas interpreter yet, and without X or 
> even glibc, I'm not sure there ever will be. It would be almost as big a
> job as a Windows port, which has been tried numerous times without 
> getting further than a proof of concept.
> 
> You can replace Android on many devices with a full Ubuntu ARM 
> installation, but you'll usually do so at the expense of some hardware 
> functionality, such as accelerated graphics or Bluetooth.
> 
> Rob
> 
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Android is increasing in popularity, but the open development platform that
> developers love is also attractive to malware creators. Download this 
> white paper to learn more about secure code signing practices that can 
> help keep Android apps secure. 
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=65839951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
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> 
Android is increasing in popularity, but the open development platform that
> developers love is also attractive to malware creators. Download this 
> white paper to learn more about secure code signing practices that can 
> help keep Android apps secure. 
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=65839951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
>
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