Maru OS becomes an open source project | Hacker News Reader

Maru OS becomes an open source project

opensourceforu.com

97 pointsrakibtg26 comments

A bit pedantic: The rendering with caption "Maru OS brings Linux to an HDMI screen using the power of your Android smartphone" is very clearly an Apple Thunderbolt display, which doesn't support HDMI, let alone have a way for an Android phone to connect directly.

Sure it does. There are HDMI adapters.

You can connect a Thunderbolt-out to HDMI in using mini-DP to HDMI, but not the other way around. There are fairly expensive HDMI to mini-DP adapters, but Thunderbolt isn't mini-DP, and requires a Thunderbolt signal.

At least they didn't use an iPhone.

I recall coming across a site for an Android-only app --- which was being shown on an iPhone in the big banner at the top of the page.

Sailfish 2.0 from Jolla seems more compelling as a Linux based phone OS.

If only there were hardware to run it on.

...But there are no apps.

You can run android apps.

Not with the open source release. The translator was never open.

So Nexus6p or Galaxy S7 support?

Umm.... Did you read the article? It clearly states only the Nexus 5 is supported at the moment.

    Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
    "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
    shortened to "The article mentions that."
    > https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Which devices are officially supported?

>Only the Nexus 5 at the moment. Both D820 and D821 models with 16GB or 32GB storage are supported.

https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/FAQ#which-devices-are-...

Until being open sourced, this was basically a one-man project, and the Nexus 5 was the only phone supported because it's what the guy had.

Theoretically it may get support for more phones in the future as more people contribute towards it and try to get it working on their specific phones.

Wish it could be based on OpenBSD instead of Linux.

Why out of curiosity? Just personal preference?

Yeah, I don't understand this either. I know that for certain cases FreeBSD has better performance, OpenBSD is possibly more secure, NetBSD more portable, but hasn't Linux proven itself enough at this point that these debates are mostly irrelevant? It's a decent UNIX like kernel, it's already used in Android and then obviously a lot of servers.

But what features or cabalities are you missing with Linux?

OpenBSD is simply a lot better designed than Linux, free from fancy bells and whistles. As the the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS, any mobile OS choosing it over Linux would have a significant advantage.

Android has bits and pieces of it, but not nearly enough.

Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD, the OpenSSL rewrite LibreSSL, and the NTP rewrite OpenNTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.

Those are some serious claims that are not at all objective. I can tell you that I have found OpenSMTPD to be at least as inelegant as just about everything else that touches mail, and PF is a good design but has always had serious competition from the commerical world.

I mean, I love OpenBSD too, but you can't drink the Kool-Aid like that. It's got just as many design tradeoffs built in as any other competent OS.

From what I see, it looks like this still uses the same kernel that's running on the phone. Thus you can't do anything but a Linux system, since that's what Android runs.

From the article:

"Android Open Source Project-based Maru provides you Android Lollipop for your smartphone and includes a Debian Linux within an LXC Linux Container for the desktop environment"

The author of the article is clearly confusing the Android version of the Linux kernel with the Debian userspace that is running under that kernel.

Do you have a mobile phone OS based on OpenBSD to share?

Some possibilities in these links:

http://openmoko.kd85.com/ http://www.defora.org/ http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1393496 http://tuxmobil.org/mobile_bsd.html http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenBSD https://www.monkey.org/openbsd-mobile/

https://copperhead.co/android/ too apparently -- a hardened open-source operating system based on Android.

I don't think even a phone as common as the Nexus 5 has drivers in OpenBSD.

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