Jolla's Sailfish OS Is Now Available For Google's Nexus 4

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Jolla's Sailfish OS Is Now Available For Google's Nexus 4

Jolla's Sailfish operating system is now available for those that wish to run their ported Mer-based mobile Linux platform on Google Nexus 4 smart-phones...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY0NTU

[stiiixy]

Uh, awesome!

Now, if only they did the Galaxy range =D

[Cyber Killer]

You know what sucks the most about phones? That I can't buy the hardware I like and then easily install any OS that I (not the manufacturer) like. This pairing of hardware with software is utter bullsh**! It's no better with ARM boards like Raspberry Pi. This whole ARM based computing is a wayback machine back to the 80s :-/.

[GreatEmerald]

You know what sucks the most about phones? That I can't buy the hardware I like and then easily install any OS that I (not the manufacturer) like. This pairing of hardware with software is utter bullsh**! It's no better with ARM boards like Raspberry Pi. This whole ARM based computing is a wayback machine back to the 80s :-/.

Yea. I don't really get the current situation either, and nobody bothered clearing it up for me when I asked on xda-developers, too. Sigh... The phones seem to have bootloaders and you can install custom things into those, so I don't see why it's impossible to port something like GRUB and then boot off an SD card to install Gentoo or such...

[panda84]

Yea. I don't really get the current situation either, and nobody bothered clearing it up for me when I asked on xda-developers, too. Sigh... The phones seem to have bootloaders and you can install custom things into those, so I don't see why it's impossible to port something like GRUB and then boot off an SD card to install Gentoo or such...

This is something Fedora is trying to approach:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/u-boot_syslinux#Benefit_to_Fedora

But if you think even the highly praised Linaro is not able to have one single ARM board completely supported upstream, that describes well the current situation (=mess).
The only one manufacturer really caring a bit is Freescale, because they're targetting the embedded enterprise market.

[Jedibeeftrix]

nearly there...

Nexus 5 please.

[dragonn]

I hope Xperia Z will get a port too, it is the same hardware as Nexus 4.

[emblemparade]

The desktop computer history has a unique history among other computing devices that led to its standardization. The IBM PC became the golden standard in the industry, not so much because of itself, but because of the mass of cheaper "PC clones" that flooded the industry. The idea very much was to allow for the same software and hardware that was already working on the IBM. Through copying and reverse engineering, many tech companies together created the de facto "PC architecture" standard. Once started, the standard continue to evolve, as companies realized how interdependent they are, and standard bodies were formed.

The case could not be more different in the mobile/tablet world right now. There is no incentive to clone any one vendor's hardware: on the contrary, the only way to compete is through differentation, and for now there is an incentive for these devices to be closed. Compared to the many huge costs involved, integrating software and hardware is small. And so vendors simply buy the best components for the device they are making ("best" might mean "cheapest"), without caring about their technical standard. During integration, all would be smoothed out. As someone here pointed out, even the boot loader is often uniquely crafted.

Android, Sailfish and Ubuntu enjoy a certain limited degree of portability due to their reliance on the open Linux kernel: indeed, it's possible for community to write kernel drivers for any hardware, but still this work of integration can be hugely challenging. The problem is not just binary blobs -- after all, binary drivers exists on the PC, too -- but the fact that every device is an almost completely unique combination of system controllers. Crucial parts of Linux need to be adapted, from bootloading to memory access and IRQ. The good news is that once Android has already been integrated into a device by the manufacturer, then it's relatively easy for other Linux-based OSes to use the same software profile. Unfortunately, these profiles need to be reverse engineered: most companies aren't publishing them, again because they have no incentive.

With the current state of the market for mobile hardware parts, I can't see something like a de facto "PC architecture" arising any time soon. I think the best we can hope for is that these "Linux profiles" become shared in a standard way, perhaps via sort of packaging format that includes the binary blobs or wrappers for them, as well as any patches needed for the kernel to boot and run. It could then be possibly to install Android/Sailfish/Ubuntu/My-unique-Linux on the device via installers than know how automatically make use of this "profile package." You would just need to specify it together with the OS, and voila, installed.

Somebody needs to take some leadership in the Linux community and create this profile package format! My opinion is that the best group to do this, the most experienced in this task of integration, is CyanogenMod. They have managed to port their OS to a very large number of devices. They would know very well what this package should include.

[89c51]

Uh, awesome!

Now, if only they did the Galaxy range =D

I think i saw an S3 running Sailfish.

[curaga]

GreatEmerald, panda84:

syslinux is not the only one, grub2 also supports chainloading from u-boot. So keep the hw-specific u-boot, chainload a better bootloader that doesn't need binary magic or hex offsets, one that supports normal plain text config files, and off ya boot.