HP Releases More WebOS Components for the TouchPad 48
About two months ago, HP made the first source releases of webOS components. Conspicuously absent, however, were the sources to the Luna system manager, and it was not possible to build an image for the TouchPad with what was available. On Tuesday, the webOS team released the Luna sources and build tools as "webOS Community Edition." This is a continuation of their previous source releases, and is intended only for the TouchPad; Open webOS is still slated for release in September and will be designed for porting to new hardware platforms. Quoting the developers: "With the release of the webOS Community Edition you can now learn how the TouchPad works, modify your TouchPad experience and then apply that learning to Open webOS 1.0 in the future. We are excited to empower the community to create custom user experiences on the TouchPad. For example, developers can now modify the card view, launcher, notifications, Just Type and more." You can grab the latest over at Github. The developers claim you can build and install it onto actual hardware: anyone want to give it a shot?
Camera (Score:5, Informative)
Will this help the Android guys get the camera to work?
Wonderful mariage (but horrible amount of work) !! (Score:4, Informative)
A fusion between Open WebOS and CyanogenMod would truly *wonderful*, but would require a fuck hell of work (and could get some help from Ubuntu...)
On one hand, this would help bring together the big popular eco-system of Android and the really marvelous "stack-of-cards" based interface of Web OS (i've been using a Pre phone almost since it release in europe and i really love it). Also under the hood, WebOS is full fledged Linux system.
With that Cyanogen would will have a truly wonderful UI, with which it could compete with other Android implementation using custom UI. (like HTC's device using HTC sense instead of the default Android UI). And WebOS could get access to the much successful world of android applications.
On the other hand these OSes are quite different beasts. Android is basically Linux kernel with a custom userland using a few standard embed libraries/utilites, but mostly a huge Android-specific runtime written in Java and running on their own Dalvik (java-like [or java-infringing if you listen to Oracle's BS]) virtual machine. webOS is mostly GNU/Linux : linux kernel, on pretty much standard user land (including DEB-like package management. Really similar to lots of other embed Linux distributions), with the exception of Luna, the graphic UI which was released today and which instead of the usually Xserver + GTK and/or QT, is DirectFB + a special custom Webkit powered "card" interface.
Now that would be in a way interesting for the Android community: propelling Android away from its former "feature-phone" Linux+Java roots into a realm of state-of-the art GNU/Linux OSes (like Maemo, like also small projects like OpenMoko). (I mean nowaday Android *IS* a real smartphone OS. *BUT* it is dissimilar from regular GNU/Linux OSes found elsewhere in the Linux ecosystem).
But that require quite some adaptation and connection between the functionnality and facilities of Android and Luna.
Note that such effort are already underway.
Long time ago, canonical has already demonstrated an Android 1.x running above stock Ubuntu and thus enabling regular Android APP to run on Ubuntu machines.
Recently Canonical has also toyed with the idea of dual-function android smartphone: it's a regular android phone when in your pocket. But there's a full fledged Ubuntu running once the smartphone is connect over HDMI to a real monitor (or docked in brainless-laptop à la AlwaysInnovating's TouchBook).
What helps is that the android-specific modifications (already all the special IPC stuff, but not the yet all the power-saving stuff) are getting incorporated into the 3.x series of linux kernels, so running stock ubuntu on a opensource android is easily possible (albeit with a shorter battery life).
And for the record: WebOS use a rather stock kernel (except for power saving features) so the Open WebOS is supposed to target modern linux 3.x kernels (sans the power saving features). So at least kernel wise open webos + android are as possible as the current android + ubuntu mixes experiments.
What really needs to be done is "only" to get the android parts to "talk" with the open web os parts. But as said, work from canonical could be leveraged here.
(For the record as WebOS is pretty much standard GNU/Linux without much customisation beside power-usage reduction, there are experiments to get Debian and Ubuntu running on webOS devices *along* webos, or at least on devices with enough flash to hold the desktop OS partition)
So an "open webos + android" combo done by collaborating CyanogenMod and WebOS internals teams (with help from canonical) would be really awesome.
But I'm not holding my breath.
(an even more crazy idea would be to get a few of the surviving openmoko guys involved: I mean they managed to do some rather crazy optimisation to get the FreeRunner to boot from several minutes down to mere seconds, and they try to create a standard framework for telephony applications over FreeSmartphone.org but that is probably just useless dreams. webos+android is cool enough).
Re:Adopting it to other OSS project? (Score:3, Informative)
I never own a touch-pad so I do not know how the thing functions or what's so special about it
It's pretty slick. I picked one up during the fire sale to root and use as a cheap Android tablet, but WebOS is really quite nice. In my experience with tablet OSes, I'd have to say it beats iOS and pre-ICS Android hands-down. ICS is a little more of a toss-up, but I still found WebOS to be a more intuitive environment to navigate.
A pity that it'll never really get any use. If it actually gained traction and someone released a distro that would work on one of my phones, I'd definitely give it a trial run.
--Jeremy
Re:Which license, bitches? (Score:4, Informative)