LG Announces webOS Open-Source Edition

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LG Announces webOS Open-Source Edition

What was Palm webOS nearly a decade ago is seeing its latest incarnation as LG webOS Open-Source Edition...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LG-webOS-Open-Source-Edition

[Schtufbox]

I loved my old Palm Pre with webOS, Ahead of it's time but never took off..or it seemed that way to me. Be interesting to see what develops!

[rgloor]

Still having several Palm devices:
- HP / Palm Pre 3
- HP / Palm Veer
- Palm Pre Plus
- some Palm Treo 680
- and I know there are still around some but not all of my older Palm devices
- Palm TX
- Palm T5
- Palm Tungsten T
- Palm Vx
- Palm m105
- Palm III

I really loved the Pre 3 with Palm webOS and it's slide-out keyboard. However, found that the Treo 680 had the best keyboard on any Palm I owned.
So it will be interesting to see if a new incarnation of webOS will still be running on this aging hardware.
But webOS was so power and energy efficient, it was out-running many newer and faster hardware.

[GraysonPeddie]

Could I have WebOS in Purism Librem 5 or Planet Gemini PDA? I know Librem 5 won't come out until early 2019.

[lucasbekker]

Does anybody know if the open-source edition of webOS contains any miracast/chromecast functionality?

[Terrablit]

Does anybody know if the open-source edition of webOS contains any miracast/chromecast functionality?

It's supposed to already be ported to and "optimized" for the RPI 3. I was going to say that you should just flash it, but the WebOS build repo has this gem:

To kick off a full build of webOS OSE, make sure you have at least 100GB of disk space available

And I found this in an article on tweakers.net:

WebOS OSE currently only supports building systems with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64bit and LG advises developers not to run the software on a virtual machine on Windows or macOS.

And I'm not having any luck finding pre-built images. So I guess I can't just tell you to be the guinea pig. Technically their build system is based on Yocto, so it ought to be portable to something other than four-year-old Ubuntu. Assuming they didn't "extend" the shit out of it.

The components list doesn't seem to suggest the presence of something dedicated that handles casting. Which is a shame, as working OSS miracast support would make my day. If anyone finds an image file, or wants to dedicate the time and energy to building this monstrosity, I guess we can find out for sure. It'd be really nice if they provided a build server to save us all the time.

Other tidbits suggest that it's been neutered and they're re-adding components:

Known Issues

• The MM(memory manager) is not implemented in the initial version. It will be added to the next version.
• While processing multimedia content, errors may occur. Debugging is in progress.
• webOS OSE 1.0 has been tested in English only and It does not support virtual keyboard (VKB).

And their hosted forum has only five posts at the moment, including the initial welcome post. So this is all very new and possibly not super functional. I have GPL source code from earlier LG TV source releases, and they were pretty anal about only including the bits they absolutely had to, and not providing anything necessary to deploy to the locked down TVs. Which required signed firmware images, anyway.

[coder111]

Um, doesn't working chromecast require private keys from Google? Last time I heard Google closed off that API completely, making the whole standard completely unusable...

Does anybody know if the open-source edition of webOS contains any miracast/chromecast functionality?

[lucasbekker]

Um, doesn't working chromecast require private keys from Google? Last time I heard Google closed off that API completely, making the whole standard completely unusable...

My webOS power TV supports miracast, does miracast suffer the same restrictions?

[starshipeleven]

My webOS power TV supports miracast, does miracast suffer the same restrictions?

No, it's an open standard. Any random 10$ chinese "screen mirroring" dongle supports Miracast fine.

[edwaleni]

My kids all had Palm Pre's with WebOS and years later they still say they were the best phone they ever had.