Samsung Sponsors The Development Of Enlightenment

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Samsung Sponsors The Development Of Enlightenment

Back in June Enlightenment E16 reached version 1.0.0 and then a few weeks later there was an E17 development snapshot released, but there hasn't been a whole lot of news out of the Enlightenment camp over the past year. In fact, most new Linux users have likely never even heard of the Enlightenment...

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

[TeoLinuX]

I really used to love Enlightenment back in the days (wow 10 years ago!). It was so promising, and so ahead of times with many effects performed on lightweight libraries.

I'm really glad to see a major company sponsoring it!
Good news!

[mycroes]

Samsung also uses Linux on TVs and DVRs. It's a shame they're not really opening much of that up, but it's nice to know if your tv is running linux anyway.

[rob2687]

Everybody it seems wants their own OS these days.

[dextro]

I'm guessing Samsung plans on using Enlightenment for the UI of Bada and that's why this is happening (it wouldn't be much of a stretch since the OpenMoko guys did a Enlightenment-based UI for their fone if I'm not mistaken).

[izual]

Samsung's Bada is NOT supposed to challenge Android. It's desinged for cheap phones in the entry level.

[yoshi314]

well, e17 definitely needs some public reviews. i found that many people are unaware of its existence.

[Songwind]

This article really made me long for a good side-by-side comparison of different types of window managers. It's hard to make an informed decision about these things unless you have the time to randomly install half a dozen environments on your system.

I'd love to see Phoronix do a feature comparison of some of these WMs and/or DEs sometime.

[Joe Sixpack]

Samsung also uses Linux on TVs and DVRs. It's a shame they're not really opening much of that up, but it's nice to know if your tv is running linux anyway.

Why is that a shame? Exactly how would "opening it up" be anything more than a minor benefit at best? I think we need to move past wanting things to be open source just for the sake of them being open source.

[cb88]

Why is that a shame? Exactly how would "opening it up" be anything more than a minor benefit at best? I think we need to move past wanting things to be open source just for the sake of them being open source.

because when you open things up ... the chumby effect happens

[mycroes]

Why is that a shame? Exactly how would "opening it up" be anything more than a minor benefit at best? I think we need to move past wanting things to be open source just for the sake of them being open source.

Not for the sake of it being open source, for the sake of being able to alter what's happening on my TV. Some people with a very similar TV (and very similar firmware) have actually done patches on the binary firmware to fix a couple annoying issues. However, the firmware for my TV is encrypted in a still unknown way, so I won't even be able to do anything with the binary.

If Samsung would open it up, I would be able to add simple stuff to it, for instance just adding some simple stuff to the filesystem, or more advanced, having my tv record content using usb connected devices.

As for the DVR, it has the annoying habit of only recording stuff when it's switched off (which is standby of course). My girlfriend forgets to do that often, but I'm sure with open firmware I would be able to at least fix part of this problem.

So that's why I would benefit with open firmware. Of course in the long term people will develop custom distributions fit for certain series of televisions if it's feasible, so at that point even average joe would benefit. However, samsung doesn't need to open their own firmware for that, just giving people a way into their television would do for that purpose.

[blaeberries]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruZCl7OaiQk

This shows illume, enlightenment for internet tablets and smartphones running on SmartQ7 with Samsung S3C6410 SoC