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

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  • #21
    The important part:
    Unless the seller can prove that modifying the software, rooting your device or flashing it with some other OS or firmware was the cause for the defect, you are still covered for defects during those 2 years.
    Which the seller will never try (apart from delaying stuff and testing your resolve/knowledge of the law).
    But overclocking your device on the other hand, would be a valid reason for voiding. If the flashing process or the new OS bricks your device, it's probably not covered by the warranty (as doing something not supported).

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    • #22
      Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
      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...
      There already is something (it's a TWRP mod called MultiROM). You need a rootable phone that allow you to change the bootloader (for example, Nexus phones/tablet).
      I've successfully had Android 4.4, Mer with Plasma Active and Ubuntu Touch installed on my Nexus 7 2012.

      See here, for example: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2011403

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      • #23
        Originally posted by Spittie View Post
        There already is something (it's a TWRP mod called MultiROM). You need a rootable phone that allow you to change the bootloader (for example, Nexus phones/tablet).
        I've successfully had Android 4.4, Mer with Plasma Active and Ubuntu Touch installed on my Nexus 7 2012.

        See here, for example: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2011403
        MultiROM isn't a bootloader replaced menu it is just a Linux kernel running a program which allows you to select a system to boot, then it loads a kernel via hacked kexec called kexec-hardboot. And you still need a specific kernel for every device.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by panda84 View Post
          This is something Fedora is trying to approach:
          https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chang...efit_to_Fedora
          Interesting.

          Originally posted by emblemparade View Post
          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.
          Uniquely as in what? The firmware executes whatever it's told to boot in the "recovery" slot as far as I can tell. What about it exactly requires unique changes?

          Originally posted by Pajn View Post
          First ARM as an architecture is hugely fragmented and is just now starting to get better.
          Second ARM boards have no standard in how stuff works and communicates which PC does.
          That the main thing that I still find unclear ? what parts of ARM platforms are different from PC platforms that the result is the one that we have right now. I mean, phones also have firmware and bootloaders and OSs, just like PCs. There seems to be some sort of standardisation in terms of bootloaders as well (the HBOOT/"fastboot mode" you get to when unlocking the bootloader looks fairly standard across most devices). The ARM architecture itself is just a processor spec, a way to send commands to the processor, so that is well standardised by itself (I can compile any software for the platform and it will work). So the issues seem to be pretty much only in the firmware/hardware init stage. More information on this would be nice.

          Originally posted by emblemparade View Post
          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.
          Well, I wouldn't be so sceptical about there never being any standards. Not long ago it seemed that all devices would have locked bootloaders, but people were loud enough and were heard. The unfortunate thing at the moment is that no company seems to be trying to do that (open up the specs and try to get it standardised ? which would at the very least help port other OSs to the devices in question). I'm not sure who is responsible for these things, though. SoC creators (Qualcomm, ARM etc.) perhaps?

          As for the "profile package", what would those contain? Specs, code, binaries? The Jolla update the article talks about is actually installed by first installing CM, then writing Sailfish on top of it. So maybe such a package would be some minimal code that could be compiled, flashed and would result in a minimal kernel+busybox setup or such, so that forking it would allow developing own OS ports?

          Originally posted by [Knuckles] View Post
          I think the reason it's because when you combine binary/proprietary crap with full access to the source code you get shait.

          By this I mean: you are a developer doing a device driver for windows. You hit some snag. The windows kernel does something in a way that really complicates your work. What are you going to do? Well, you have to code around it. And at the end you hopefully have a working driver and submit it for validation to microsoft, and if they didn't like the hack, they throw that crap back onto you and you'll have even more costs for the re-validation.

          Now with android/linux you have full access to the source. You hit some snag. Well you could put in some work to solve it... or you could hack whatever you're working on. You know you aren't going to bother submitting code upstream. You know you won't have to maintain the hack because LOL maintaining old android devices who are we kidding. So you hack hack hack the kernel, and then you hack your code and all is well. Then you ship the kernel and your crappy code.
          And you do this for all the drivers in the system.
          Well, that's not the main issue. I don't really care how many hacks were applied; I want to run my own OS in some fashion (it doesn't have to do more than just boot into something visible, for starters). If most drivers don't work, it's fine, as long as *something* actually gets booted. Also, the kernel hacks would be visible in the kernel source, which is mandatory to be provided.

          Originally posted by [Knuckles] View Post
          So this is mainly the manufacturers not giving a f###. But yeah, agree completely: why is not my phone like a computer? Why do I have to buy a new phone to access new software, and not new *hardware*. Of course with an older phone you might not be able to use some software that needs a hardware feature, or some other software may be slow. But "you can't run this because you don't have android X.Y", and then "you can't have android X.Y because your manufacturer doesn't give a crap" are lame excuses.
          Yeap, that's what annoys me too. Though mostly the inability to install whatever one wants. I'd like to get a feel for Sailfish, Nemo, Firefox, Ubuntu, Tizen etc. etc. to see what offers what, but apparently something prevents that from happening.

          Originally posted by Spittie View Post
          There already is something (it's a TWRP mod called MultiROM). You need a rootable phone that allow you to change the bootloader (for example, Nexus phones/tablet).
          I've successfully had Android 4.4, Mer with Plasma Active and Ubuntu Touch installed on my Nexus 7 2012.

          See here, for example: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2011403
          Huh, that's pretty cool. That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking of.

          Though what does this have to do with rooting? This seems to only require an unlocked bootloader.

          By the way, thanks for the answers, everyone. I appreciate this, as only recently I got to play around with a few ARM devices and the current situation is interesting for me.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
            Though what does this have to do with rooting? This seems to only require an unlocked bootloader.
            Actually you're probably right, sorry. I wrote root, but in fact you only seems to need a modified kernel, a modified bootloader and a modified recovery, and you can install those without root (but while you're at it, why not? )
            I've just reinstalled Mer, just because, and it's way better than it was the last time I tried it. Still not good as a daily driver (mostly because it uses a lot of the desktop inferface, which is not nice at all to use on a phone/tablet), but it's getting there.

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            • #26
              While this is progress, I wouldn't say it's ready for regular use by any means, given that it doesn't support phone calls yet.

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              • #27
                Jolla just released the Sailfish monthly for April for Jolla phones. I'm assuming shortly we will see it on this Nexus 4 image.http://www.jollatides.com/2014/04/11...-mms-and-more/
                But you can always ask at
                webchat.freenode.net #sailfishos

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