Open webOS Running On The Google Nexus 7

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open webOS Running On The Google Nexus 7

The developers behind the Open webOS project have brought the mobile operating system to Google's Nexus 7 tablet...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI2NjI

[liam]

Phoronix: Open webOS Running On The Google Nexus 7

The developers behind the Open webOS project have brought the mobile operating system to Google's Nexus 7 tablet...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI2NjI

Great news. WebOS uses much of the Linux stack so any work on that to get it working well in the embedded space is for the good. Of course linaro does lots of work in this area in particular so let's hope that the webos folks see that work and integrate it.
Of course my big hope for a viable open stack in the future is still firefoxOS. It already runs better than webos on lower end hardware.

[zanny]

Of course my big hope for a viable open stack in the future is still firefoxOS.

Why future? FFOS is getting pretty popular in Asia already. The best part about it is you can just write html5 apps that already work everywhere else and expect them to work on those devices too, so no need to wait for mass adoption, the tech behind it is already on every pc.

[liam]

Why future? FFOS is getting pretty popular in Asia already. The best part about it is you can just write html5 apps that already work everywhere else and expect them to work on those devices too, so no need to wait for mass adoption, the tech behind it is already on every pc.

Just to be clear, I am referring to Firefox OS, or, the project formerly known as Boot2Gecko. The first devices aren't officially going to be released until sometime in H1 of 2013 so I don't know how it could be that generally popular in Asia yet. Certainly people have been running it on the initial target device of the GS2 but those are unofficial devices and thus not optimized for the experience.
From my readings the developers have since started targeting much lower end devices so their new work should run even more efficiently. What I don't know is what they are running on the lower layers. DBUS? PA? X?
Those are some of the things that made webOS so attractive to Linux folks.

[DrYak]

That looks great.

I currently love webOS on my phone and I'm looking forward to still having possibilities running webOS on my future portable devices - which is made possible by the opensource community edition of webos.

- Now let's hope that some webOS hacker manages to port a small part of the Android stack to have a way to run Android Apps above webOS (like the Android-on-Berry, Android-on-Ubuntu, etc.) so this OS can even get a little bit more mainstream usage. (this is more difficult, but open webOS to a very rich echo system of apps, users, etc.)

- Also I hope that with all the other HTML oriented systems around (Firefox OS, Chrome OS, one of the type of application on Windows 8, etc.) we can finally see more cross platform HTML-apps which can also run on webOS. (this is much more easy, but the HTML-App ecosystem is a lot less developed)

With either one of those, we can have a luck at getting a little bit more mainstream acceptance of the webos system.

The webOS system has a few key advantages:
- under the hood, it's a full standard GNU/Linux stack like any other Linux distribution. Not just a Linux kernel with a special java-like userland like android.
- the graphical interface on top of it, although not standard X nor Wayland (though it should be easy to adapt to Wayland, which could easily open the OS to QT and GTK applications too) is very sleek and very useful. I personally find that the "stack of cards" metaphor is very well suited for small pocket devices (hence my choice of OS on my current smartphone).