waydroid anybody?

[Edmund]

waydroid anybody?

Tried a couple of times so far no luck or info.
My system is Mint 21.3 XFCE

So for instance :
https://technobursts.com/how-to-install-waydroid-on-linux-mint/

Interesting site.
Prerequisites
Before we begin, ensure your Linux Mint system meets the following
requirements:

Linux Mint Version: Linux Mint 20. x; Ulyana, Ulyssa, Uma, Una, or any
other that is out of the above list but newer.
Kernel Version: 5. kernel 10 or newer (for check type in terminal
Windows-name -r).

Lets do that :
$ Windows-name -r
Windows-name: command not found

Wayland Support: As you would expect, since Waydroid, where the project
is aimed at, is Wayland, it would be most advantageous to just check
whether it’s supported in your case.

Q: No clue given on HOW to check such a thing.

Linux Mint by default employs Xorg, but there is an option to work with
Wayland sessions.

Q: they seem to think we somehow know HOW but I don't.

----------
On another site I found :
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-enable-disable-wayland-on-ubuntu-22-04-desktop

results in several errors like missing folders and whatnot

[Paul]

Post by Edmund
waydroid anybody?
Tried a couple of times so far no luck or info.
My system is Mint 21.3 XFCE
https://technobursts.com/how-to-install-waydroid-on-linux-mint/
Interesting site.
Prerequisites
Linux Mint Version: Linux Mint 20. x; Ulyana, Ulyssa, Uma, Una, or any other that is out of the above list but newer.
Kernel Version: 5. kernel 10 or newer (for check type in terminal Windows-name -r).
$ Windows-name -r
Windows-name: command not found
Wayland Support: As you would expect, since Waydroid, where the project is aimed at, is Wayland, it would be most advantageous to just check whether it’s supported in your case.
Q: No clue given on HOW to check such a thing.
Linux Mint by default employs Xorg, but there is an option to work with Wayland sessions.
Q: they seem to think we somehow know HOW but I don't.
----------
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-enable-disable-wayland-on-ubuntu-22-04-desktop
results in several errors like missing folders and whatnot

Some of us like inxi.

inxi -F # Everything
inxi -G # Graphics

On Ubuntu, you can select the windowing choice at login time.
If you have been auto-logging, select logout from the power button menu,
then you will see the login box. Clicking in the login box, will cause
an icon to appear in the lower right corner, and then you can select the
alternate. The menu has either Wayland or Xorg as choices.

[Picture]

Loading Image...

Wayland. There are more than several errors :-) What a mess!

Nautilus ("Files") no longer runs in Wayland.
Every workaround I try... breaks something else.
Is this cool, or what ? :-)

I installed Nemo and that worked.

You won't be doing the WayDroid on Ubuntu 24.04. Sorry.
I am undoubtedly missing some updates. That's gotta be it, right?
Just a few more updates. Come on, updates. Do your thing.
Maybe some Snaps ? How about a Tylenol. OK, now I'm feeling better.

Now the question is, would Linux Mint be any better if switched
to Wayland, or would the material defects in the Ubuntu packaging
just be copied to Linux Mint ? Hmmm. Oops, snack time. My
pizza pop is ready.

Paul

[Alan K.]

Post by Edmund
Kernel Version: 5. kernel 10 or newer (for check type in terminal Windows-name -r).
$ Windows-name -r
Windows-name: command not found

try uname -r

[Edmund]

Post by Alan K.

Post by Edmund
Kernel Version: 5. kernel 10 or newer (for check type in terminal Windows-name -r).
$ Windows-name -r
Windows-name: command not found

try uname -r

I know, my point is that even the very first thing they mention is wrong.

[Mike Easter]

Post by Edmund
Tried a couple of times so far no luck or info.
My system is Mint 21.3 XFCE

I don't have the latest info digested, but my understanding from msg/s
this year from the LM forum is that LM Cinnamon's wayland is considered
in the alpha stage, and LM XFCE's is somewhere behind that.

That is, in spite of what your Sep article says (which fails to mention
Cinn vs XFCE issue) that LM is not quite ready for wayland. I suspect
your article was written w/ Cinn in mind.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=411761

Post by Edmund
WAYLAND - read this first!
Using Wayland for the Cinnamon desktop is a work in progress.
Of the 3 editions currently only Cinnamon has working (experimental) Wayland support.

https://github.com/linuxmint/wayland/issues

If I were going to experiment w/ LM + waydroid, I would do it w/ a live
LM Cinn, not my operational and installed LM XFCE.

[Mike Easter]

Post by Mike Easter
If I were going to experiment w/ LM + waydroid, I would do it w/ a live
LM Cinn, not my operational and installed LM XFCE.

However, that would NOT be my first choice. My first choice would be to
boot a live distro which is known to support wayland OOTB.

The waydroid site addresses installing it on a number of different
distro/s. While it mentions Ub and Deb (but not LM) this is an occasion
in which LM is NOT the 'same as' Ub.

[Edmund]

Post by Mike Easter
If I were going to experiment w/ LM + waydroid, I would do it w/ a
live LM Cinn, not my operational and installed LM XFCE.

However, that would NOT be my first choice.  My first choice would be to
boot a live distro which is known to support wayland OOTB.
The waydroid site addresses installing it on a number of different
distro/s.  While it mentions Ub and Deb (but not LM) this is an occasion
in which LM is NOT the 'same as' Ub.

Yeah I know, once upon a time there was a certain person said about the
utter stupidity of zillion incompatible linux flavors each with a number
of incompatible DE's
He was insulted and ridiculed and yet again he is proven to be right all
the time.
Forgot his name, something beginning with ed and ending with mund I think.

[Mike Easter]

Post by Edmund
Yeah I know, once upon a time there was a certain person said about the
utter stupidity of zillion incompatible linux flavors each with a number
of incompatible DE's

Well, that certain person can play the linux game the same way the Win
people play their game. You can 'accept' one distribution and one
desktop environment along w/ the apps which are available for it. You
could go the RedHat way or the Canonical way or the Linux Mint way or
some other. The advantage of doing it the linux way is that you have a
lot more choices. With Win it is the MS way or the highway.

Well, there is also the ability to do some linux dev in Win w/ their WSLs.

[Edmund]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by Edmund
Yeah I know, once upon a time there was a certain person said about
the utter stupidity of zillion incompatible linux flavors each with a
number of incompatible DE's

Well, that certain person can play the linux game the same way the Win
people play their game.  You can 'accept' one distribution and one
desktop environment along w/ the apps which are available for it.  You
could go the RedHat way or the Canonical way or the Linux Mint way or
some other.  The advantage of doing it the linux way is that you have a
lot more choices.  With Win it is the MS way or the highway.

You don't get it and you never will, so better stop trying.

[Mike Easter]

Post by Edmund
You don't get it and you never will, so better stop trying.

No; I understand your point. It is more difficult to dev apps for
'linux' because linux is a lot of different things which means there is
not just one 'target' to dev for, but many. So dev/s have to figure out
how they are going to deal w/ that, whether the issue is systemd or not,
wayland or not, this or that compositor, this or that packaging system
ranging from .deb to .rpm to flatpak to snapd to appimage, and this or
that DE or WM.

Consequently, a variety of strategies have dev/d to aid in the 'crossing
over' from one distro to another such as compiling from source.

The part that you don't get is that linux in its many iterations is not
Windows and it is not Mac and it is not android or iOS.

[Mike Easter]

My first choice would be to boot a live distro which is known to support
wayland OOTB.

I booted a live KDE Neon (I don't like Gnome) and to the default Neon I
added inxi to check for the wayland and synaptic to use to add stuff. I
added the waydroid repo according to the waydroid install instructions*.
The addition of waydroid added a LOT of dependencies and updates.

The google AI instructions for adding the waydroid repo were NOT
correct; there is no waydroid ppa.

After adding the repo, waydroid appeared in synaptic and I installed it
along w/ all of its myriad dependencies and updates. When it is run it
wants to initialize itself and there are a couple of choices I don't
understand. I haven't learned anything about the initialization step
yet. It wants to dl system & vendor according to either vanilla or
GAPPS andoird type.

Alternatively, you can dl a 'complete' Ub 22.04 Gnome or KDE .iso to
boot live which already has the waydroid integrated.
https://waydro.id/#wdlinux


* https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops

[Mike Easter]

Post by Mike Easter
That is, in spite of what your Sep article says (which fails to mention
Cinn vs XFCE issue) that LM is not quite ready for wayland.  I suspect
your article was written w/ Cinn in mind.

This is a more up-to-date article by Jack Wallen ZDNet Nov 13.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-run-android-apps-on-linux/

He chose a current Ub Gnome. He also addressed my initialization
confusion by recommending GAPPS mode instead of Vanilla.

I found his article MUCH more informative than either the initial LM
article OR the waydroid site, which has a lot of pages but none that
answered all of my confusion.

However, the waydroid site DOES link to a waydroid distro site for Gnome
or KDE.

JW's article also has useful info about the android ID and the Google
Store. What JW's article fails to do is to express the limitations of
the idea of running waydroid on some distro which doesn't wayland. That
limitation is a big deal and should be addressed by anyone who wants to
tell the user to install waydroid on 'something'. The only sentence in

Post by Mike Easter
(I'll be using Ubuntu Desktop 24.04),

Compared to the beginning of this thread; that sentence is /essential/.

Post by Mike Easter

Post by Edmund
My system is Mint 21.3 XFCE

[Mike Easter]

Post by Mike Easter
He chose a current Ub Gnome. He also addressed my initialization
confusion by recommending GAPPS mode instead of Vanilla.
I found his article MUCH more informative than either the initial LM
article OR the waydroid site, which has a lot of pages but none that
answered all of my confusion.
However, the waydroid site DOES link to a waydroid distro site for
Gnome or KDE.

I chose to look into this waydroid biz w/ my live Neon + waydroid which
is based on Ub 24.04 & current waydroid rather than the .iso waydroid
distro which is both older AND more importantly says that it won't run live.

However, I ran into a snag as my CPU didn't suit the system as it didn't
have SSSE3 (not to be confused w/ sse3) so during the initialization
step after install I got an error alert about that which is also in the
waydroid log.

So; Edmund, your LM XFCE has inxi by default. If you will run

inxi -Cx

... it will show you your cpu flags.

Post by Mike Easter
SSSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extension 3) is Intel's name for
the SSE instruction set's fourth iteration. 16 new instructions, also
available as MMX-extension with _m64 intrinsic datatype. SSSE3 was
introduced in Intel's Core Microarchitecture. SSSE3-intrinsic
functions are available in Visual C or Intel-C .

More at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSSE3

[Mike Easter]

Post by Mike Easter
However, I ran into a snag as my CPU didn't suit the system as it didn't
have SSSE3 (not to be confused w/ sse3) so during the initialization
step after install I got an error alert about that which is also in the
waydroid log.

Besides the waydroid research, I also looked into Google's ChromeOS
Flex, even tho' I don't have any hardware which is listed in the
certified hardware tables G provides.

On two different devices which weren't certified, the live USB was able
to boot, but for some reason I wasn't able to get past the credentialing
process which needs a gmail + pass and a telno, just like setting up a
google account. I have all that and did all that but for inexplicable
reasons it didn't work, so I wasn't able to get past the satisfactory
bootup to investigate the actual functionality.

During the process of checking hardware, I did discover that I have a
laptop which has the necessary SSSE3 flag waydroid wants, so I'll use it
to investigate waydroid. That station isn't currently w/in arm's reach
of this, so I don't have a report yet. I'll also have to struggle a
little bit w/ its connectivity, as its wifi isn't recognized OOTB by
many live distro/s w/ the exception of MX, which MX doesn't wayland.

[Mike Easter]

I have a laptop which has the necessary SSSE3 flag waydroid wants,

Waydroid initialization (where it dl/s 700 meg from sourceforge) finds
that the cpu didn't support SSE4.2 but it was able to drop back for that
problem to 'x86...'

Since I'm not really an android user (I have a smart phone that doesn't
have connectivity) which has an old android, and my cell w/ connectivity
doesn't have android, it uses an ancient linux; I have no idea what
purpose I would find for android availability on a linux.

Following Jack Wallen's instructions (I would not have known how to
handle the conditions which have arisen otherwise) I was able to obtain
the waydroid's ID #. However, even satisfactorily playing all of
google's anti-robot games, I was unsuccessful in registering the ID,
even tho' google said that I had, google also said 'This device isn't
Play Protect certified - to run Google apps or use google services etc.

I can log into that google account 'free style' -- that is not using
waydroid but the linux browser. The android condition is 'rough'; the
cursor handling is 'reckless' - inconsistent screen action, the transfer
of information or event from mouse click to screen action is retarded.
So far the experience isn't really good, but at least I'm 'in' waydroid
in a current Neon.

I think this is all a VM type relationship. I'm not fond of VMs for my
purposes.