GNU/Linux on mobile phones and PDAs

[Ramprasad Joshi]

I googled the topic "GNU/Linux on mobile phones and PDAs" in various forms, but after browsing some 10 articles, I am not sure what is the "current" status. Please enlighten me. I also want to know which phone models use genuine FOSS only.

[Nishith Rastogi]

http://www.openmoko.org/ 

Regards
Nishith Rastogi

+91-9663384111
--------------------------------------------
Linux: My 42

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Ramprasad Joshi <ram...@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

I googled the topic "GNU/Linux on mobile phones and PDAs" in various forms, but after browsing some 10 articles, I am not sure what is the "current" status. Please enlighten me. I also want to know which phone models use genuine FOSS only.

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[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

Unhelpful but interesting, Stallman has some thoughts on cell phones here: http://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html

Cellular Phones

• I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices.

• In addition, most of them are computers with nonfree software installed. Even if they don't allow the user to replace the software, someone else can replace it remotely. Since the software can be changed, we cannot regard it as equivalent to a circuit. A machine that allows installation of software is a computer, and computers should run free software.

• When I need to call someone, I ask someone nearby to let me make a call.

--
Emaad Ahmed Manzoor

[Nishith Rastogi]

Point one reminds of the exchange between Christian Bale and Morgan Freeman towards the end of the Dark Night. 

Regards
Nishith Rastogi

+91-9663384111
--------------------------------------------
Linux: My 42

[Bhaavan Merchant]

Amongst the current mobile OS, my knowledge is as follows:

Meego: GPL + LGPL

Open webOS: GPL

Boot2Gecko: MPL


The most promising one, IMO is Boot2Gecko with Mozilla brand attached to it. However it is in an early stage of development and has just moved beyond working prototypes. Its apps infrastructure will be HTML5 dependent and I fail to understand if that will deliver a performance on par with native openGL applications.

Personally for me is still Android for it is fairly open source. It may not be fully so, but a lot of its code lies in staging of the kernel. The app ecosystem itself pushes android way above these others (including a proprietary OS which just released and another one which releases last week October).

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Emaad Ahmed Manzoor <emaadm...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Bhaavan Merchant

[Bhaavan Merchant]

oh, and did I mention Ubuntu for Android, Gnome 3's mobile roadmap, and likewise for KDE. How free one would call these is subjective.

There is too much fragmentation out there. So many choices may not always be a good thing. In a weird analogy to Indian politics, one is required to choose the least worse option amongst a sea of choices.

--
Bhaavan Merchant

[Ramprasad Joshi]

In labbe-lu'aab (लब्बे लु'आब) I want to use cellphones with free
software so that I am free to shoot myself in the foot, but the seller
cannot shoot anywhere near me. Or otherwise, I want a cellphone with
completely proprietary things, so that if the seller shoots me dead,
the seller arranges for the undertaker too.

The rest below is [OT] for many but exactly relevant for what Emaad began. Thanks Emaad for the link, I did not know of it.

I agree with RMS on almost all counts in that lifestyle page, except these:
* I may occasionally like to wear words and symbols on shirts if I like their message and I find the message funny enough (not requiring gravity in presentation)
* Most of the music genres he likes are not known to me, some not even by names. And I prefer Hindustani Classical to Carnatic.
* On avoiding cards and phones: I do not subscribe to a personal puritan rejection of such evils in formal public transactions as the society and its ossified structures impose on me. I find it pointless, but at the same time I want to be free to try to convince people to reject them, to try to garner support in numbers as well as spirit for their uprooting. At the same time, in all my engagements with individuals and informal groups, I want to assert my right to rejection of any such thing as I find abhorrent or a violation of my or public freedom. So I will make a target: I want to be free of the need to depend on these things along with their evils. I want the things without their evils. How to go about it? This concern I want to be made a shared concern in the society.
* Something he did not mention at all: healthcare! I prefer dying to being forced into some treatment regime by a doctor without their sharing all their beliefs and factual/rational arguments about the line of treatment with me. I cannot entrust my body and health and well-being to anyone except a friend on the same philosophical ground as I. I am sure RMS would agree with me in this. For me, more than the doctor's knowledge and expertise, what is important is whether the relationship with the doctor is free of fear and unequal exchange.

Anyway, for phones, I tried Sxxxung Gxxxxy S-II. I faced problems that can be summed up as "unreliability". And it is not clear, to anyone including the service personnel I met and showed the phone, whether the problem is in the software and/or hardware. Finally they said they confirm my suspicions, but now I don't want to entrust the repairs to them. And I have no alternative but to hand it over to them! Almost every new high-end product I see in hardware and/or software with a big glamour has given me such problems in the last 10 years. I don't think under-warranty replacement compensates even for the formally paid expenses I incur on account of the product, let alone my operational loss and the trouble I go through.

I suppose a private-public bureaucracy has replaced govt bureaucracy-private service combination in India; perhaps this is true of the whole world. And not just in wearing ties, but in all organised aspects of life, the phenomenon of victim-coperpetrators as coined by RMS is being replicated in a nuclear chain reaction.

>________________________________
> From: Emaad Ahmed Manzoor <emaadm...@gmail.com>
>To: lug-b...@googlegroups.com
>Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 3:50 PM
>Subject: Re: [lug-bitsgoa] GNU/Linux on mobile phones and PDAs

>
>
>Unhelpful but interesting, Stallman has some thoughts on cell phones here: http://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html
>
>
>Cellular Phones

>    * I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and

surveillance devices.  They all enable the phone system to record
where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted
into listening devices.

>    * In addition, most of them are computers with nonfree software

installed.  Even if they don't allow the user to replace the software,
someone else can replace it remotely.  Since the software can be
changed, we cannot regard it as equivalent to a circuit.  A machine
that allows installation of software is a computer, and computers
should run free software.

>    * When I need to call someone, I ask someone nearby to let me

[Lynus Vaz]

The GNU/linux options I've heard of are:
1. Tizen (only prototypes out so far. Full Tizen phones look to be some way away.)
2. Meego (Nokia's N9, but it's future looks poor)
3. Samsung was rumoured to be working on something; don't know the current status
4. Boot2gecko
5. Jolla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla) that aims to launch a phone this year, perhaps?

I'd say there probably won't be 'completely free' software on phones; it's usually free + some non-free hardware-specific stuff.

In my opinion, the quality and reliability depend more on the manufacturer than the OS.

Regards,
Lynus

[Dhananjay Sathe]

Sir put BootToGeko on your S2 , works quite well , you can dual boot it with AOSP based Cm10. :P

Yes coming back to the question of openness and os on the flagship phones. First ill make a full declaration I am admittedly a Android "fanboy".

Also at the same time i'll also reveal that i have used sam#$%^& s&i**y spin for 10 days at best in the 15 months i have used this device. 

Does a true open source mobile Os exist ?

Lets center this around the S2 as that is the device of concern and also luckily the device i use too. 

first lets look at what is the main problem  about what is really closed source.

All the open source drivers for this device are now available except libEGL - i.e. the opengl es acceleration bits.

It needs to be understood that we are talking device driver ko files and firmware bits here , very rarely are these open sourced , even on the desktop front (Intel new mobile cpu or the new clarksdale pipe drivers (finally llvm got those bits), nvidia glx, ati proprietary bits to name a few). Until those are open source it becomes hard for us to compile the linux kernel on this device. Only phone to be completely open source for all driver bits is currently the international GSM Galaxy Nexus

Ok once a while for ever major abi switch sammy releases the kernel source for this phone we build the o with the latest kernel patches.

Now the more interesting OS part.

AOSP or the android open source project is true to it's name it gives you the os as a open source project is supposed to . It comes with NO google branding , no proprietary apps or code . there are modes to just use a primary bunch of yahoo or windows live accounts and services instead of google! 

Cyanogenmod is perhaps the most popular such distro that derives off the AOSP. It comes free of google and in the GPL  domain.It takes a explicit step , mind you not a simple apk install but  aflash from recovery to add in the gapps (google apps ) biuts that allow it to talk to google or use it's services. Now we choose this, why do we do so ? Face it , all of us use google mail , maps search etc etc etc. (you could very well not install maps or mail) and last but not the least the prized access to the Google Play store.(A glorified repository in our world ???)

This is obviously run of google infra uses their branding , engineering and hence u have to accept a couple of licences and TOC etc. Ok here is the deal. This needs to be understood Yes a desktop based platform Open Source platform we have a great ecosystem (some may argue against it but well lets just assume we are happy with it and they can go hop for all we care)..On mobile the picture is very different.

The os alone is nothing , many chinese os have shown that , it's the rich apps and content that have lead the mobile revolution . and it is what drives it.

This is the only closed part.Of the Opensource OS i have run on my mobile here is what i came up with.

Cyanogenmod : Based on AOSP : the best esp afetr cm 10 based on android 4.1.1. Jelly Bean

AOKP : mods to aosp and cm , much more customizable , poor support vs cm

Then is the ARM build of Archlinux : well we have the whole OS nothing much i can use it for as a mobile device :(

then comes Boot to Geko : Brilliant flower , great os , ties you into too much web and poor connectivity and incomplete html5 standards kill it .Also all code is GPL but mozilla branded (we can live with that). Simply not yet ready for prime time .

(P.S sir you could dual boot this with Cm10 and play with it .)

I have played with these  some point of time , not really got my hands dirty , but here is what i could gauge.

Tizen and megoo are like android , great , the os is open source but to use the app ecosystem u need to sign into nokia stores ! (not a patch on google play)

KDE ditched it's mobile effort as it ran out of funds after Canonical pulled the plug (they were the primary sponsors for the past few years)

Gnome mobile os is far flung , 2-3 years offf.

Ubuntu Mobile existed a while back for slates , I had given it a spin that died out due to lack of an ecosystem. Infact a agreement of sorts b/w google and canonical killed it off as Android was in infancy and they wanted only one Open src os to catch adoption and not have dev efforts split up.

All that being said you can adopt a balance of both . as i have iterated my POV a true closed walled garden is absolute shit, but a true Open src world is like sticking to gandhian ideology in this day . It simply is to philosophical and won't work. The balance has to be struck . You can optimise the use of FOSS liek switch to AOSP and just use Google apps (trust me the OS and app and the experience is way way way better than Saxxxxsung ot HTC or Moto or Apple or any OEM , 4.1.1 is simply the best Mobile OS i have ever seen !) 

Get a nexus device :P 

RMS is RMS we can't live without a mobile device , sorry !

That was my 2 n a bit  or unorganised random rambling on the issue. 

Dhananjay Deepak Sathe | +91 976-487-1950
dhananj...@gmail.com,dhananj...@acm.org,f200...@bits-goa.ac.in,
Final Year Undergraduate,
BE(Hons) Electronics and Instrumentation,
BITS Pilani Goa Campus.

[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

Picking my brain around this thought:

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Dhananjay Sathe <dhananj...@gmail.com> wrote:

The os alone is nothing , many chinese os have shown that , it's the rich apps and content that have lead the mobile revolution . and it is what drives it.

Isn't it strange that all our Android applications and the ones at the store are closed-source by default? And that we're mostly comfortable with that? This is so different from our desktop/laptop distributions where having closed software (if any) implies a few hours of trial, error and Wine hackery.

Though in contrast to desktop software, I find myself way more annoyed when I see an obvious bug in a mobile application that I could fix easily, so I either live with it or scrounge around for an alternative. Not to mention the big privacy issues with closed-source mobile applications siphoning off your usage data.

It would be awesome to see a massive ecosystem of open-source mobile application alternatives, the way we're used to on bigger devices.

--
Emaad Ahmed Manzoor

[Abhishek Kumar]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 6:11 AM, Emaad Ahmed Manzoor <emaadm...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Isn't it strange that all our Android applications and the ones at the store are closed-source by default? And that we're mostly comfortable with that? This is so different from our desktop/laptop distributions where having closed software (if any) implies a few hours of trial, error and Wine hackery.

http://f-droid.org/

http://www.aopensource.com/

Its still a small subset, but its growing pretty fast.

~A

[Dhananjay Sathe]

Yes it's true most apps are closed source , it's turned to an economy of it's own. 

However I figure even for the Opens Src apps on android we will see src code shipping in the market.  There are many apps that put out the source code , of course the market distributes the binaries only. It does not make sense to package the source at all in the market  for the following reasons

• The space and computing power limitations on a vast majority of devices
• The way dalvik or whatever subsystem in android handles the code it has to be packaged in an apk 
• Most android users are not programmers (unlike linux there are 500 million plus now !)
• There is a limitation to the amount of debugging and development that even a developer is going to do on a mobile device due to productivity, power and convenience offered.
• no dev tools (barring soem basic ones) exist on androidor any mobile platform for that matter

Look in the apps description , you'll find a link to googlecode or github or any other dev page :)

Here is a small list , i have seen plenty more : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_Android_applications

This is the kind of hybrid real world i keep referring to. I believe this is the way forward.

Cheers ! 

Dhananjay Deepak Sathe | +91 976-487-1950
dhananj...@gmail.com,dhananj...@acm.org,f200...@bits-goa.ac.in,
Final Year Undergraduate,
BE(Hons) Electronics and Instrumentation,
BITS Pilani Goa Campus.

[Dhananjay Sathe]

As i wrote this, I just checked apart from the OS apps (all open source ;) ) approximately  30% of app i use are open source . Not to forget the major google apps are not open source . and of course the games (i don'tt see many of them on the desktop either ;D ) . 

P.S chromium for mobile exists :D 

You cannot have a true open source world it is not possible ! Even RMS won't be able to live in one :D

Cheers !

Dhananjay Deepak Sathe | +91 976-487-1950
dhananj...@gmail.com,dhananj...@acm.org,f200...@bits-goa.ac.in,
Final Year Undergraduate,
BE(Hons) Electronics and Instrumentation,
BITS Pilani Goa Campus.

[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

F-Droid is awesome, thanks!

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Abhishek Kumar <abhishek...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Bhaavan Merchant]

boot2Gecko expected soon: http://www.businessinsider.com/zte-mozilla-phone-2012-9

Bhaavan Merchant

[Bhaavan Merchant]

Ubuntu mobile was released today. It's keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=player_embedded .

The keynote seems extremely promising. However, many would (I plead guilty on  this charge too) despise mobile os fragmentation.

License wise I assume it to be like Ubuntu, a mix of GPL and LGPL.

Development of apps for this, I think, is HTML5, and native apps in Qt.

Hopefully for me though, such innovation should find its way into other open mass OS like Android, and cohesively build an ecosystem to counter the patents curse.

--
Bhaavan Merchant