MicroXwin Creators Have A PC That Runs Debian & Android Together

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 19 July 2014 at 08:25 AM EDT. 15 Comments
HARDWARE
The company behind MicroXwin, a kernel-based X Windows implementation that claims to be the smallest and fastest X implementation, has come up with a unified Linux distribution that runs Android and Debian/Ubuntu applications simultaneously.

Vasant Kanchan of the VolksPC, the company behind MicroXwin and this new project, wrote into Phoronix on Friday telling us about this dual Ubuntu/Debian + Android PC. Vasant explained:
This demo is running on a RK3066 dual core set top box. Some features of this implementation that your readers may be interested in knowing:

1. Both Android and Debian apps run at native speeds. Debian apps don't depend on Android unlike other implementation of Debian on Android which are based on VNC running on Android.
2. We did not change Android to implement this (other than start-up scripts). This means we have full compatibility with all Android applications.
3. MicroXwin provides the X-Wndows framework and it is much faster as seen running on ARM based Raspberry Pi

It's an interesting demo and VolksPC has put out a demo with Android "Jelly Bean" and Debian LXDE running hand-in-hand via the video below.


Also included was the video showing off the MicroXwin performance on the Raspberry Pi:


For right now they have ported this unified Linux distribution to an MK808 mini-PC stick. At VolksPC.org isn't too much more information right now, but the page explains, "Many desktop distributions such as Debian are already available for ARM and x86. But Debian ARM does not support YouTube playback and because of a lack of drivers, HD video playback is just not possible. Android, on the other hand, does this very well and also has many applications not available on Debian. So we created a unified distribution that allows both Android and Debian LXDE/XFCE applications to run simultaneously at native speeds. On ARM, our distribution is based on a modified ARMHF Debian Wheezy rootfs."

Stay tuned for more information on this interesting project out of VolksPC.
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