X Server Now Available For Android

New submitter mkwan writes "The open-source X Server for Android has hit beta and is now available for download through the Android Market. On Australian networks at least, smartphones are assigned publicly-accessible IP addresses, so it should be possible to display many Linux applications on an Android smartphone simply by setting the DISPLAY environment variable to the phone's IP address followed by :0" The source is available under the MIT license (or Apache; the project page and story disagree) over at Google Code. It doesn't support all of the X protocol and there's no Xlib implementation (i.e. no X11 apps on the device yet except via the NDK if you're lucky), but it is a reimplementation of the X server in Java for Android. You can run remote applications at least.

Crap. The WORST SECURITY thing to tell people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing what the article says requires you to use "xhost +" as the magic cookie requirements will not have been met.

Second, even with the magic cookie, all transmissions to/from the X server are unencrypted - which means your magic cookie (the password to the X server) is passed in cleartext for anyone to see.

Having an X server on android is usefull, but also get ssh. That will securely route the X protocol (with encryption) from a remote (to the android display) system and with proper display.

SSH, I hope?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I hope that nobody would actually consider a remote X session without tunnelling over ssh...

Reinveting the Wheel, Backwards

[Microlith]

I suppose this should be interesting, but mostly it strikes me as dumb. Mostly as a result of Google having reinvented the wheel by creating an entirely new and no more efficient or effective rendering and windowing subsystem for Android, then having the rest of the open source community chase along behind them. I suppose that's not terribly surprising, seeing as how Android was proprietary out of the gate until Google bought them.

In other news, I'll hope that my N900 holds out and that another device, probably one from Samsung running Tizen, comes along before it fails.