The Android which really made it: Openmoko reopen now | Hacker News Reader

The Android which really made it: Openmoko reopen now

openmoko.com

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Openmoko is a project which encompasses two related sub-projects, with the combined aim of creating a family of open source mobile phones.[1] The project was founded by FIC.

The first sub-project is Openmoko Linux, an open source Linux based operating system designed for mobile phones, built using free software.

The second sub-project is the development of hardware devices on which Openmoko Linux runs. The first device released was the inconsistently-named Neo 1973 or Neo1973[2][3], which was followed up by the Neo Freerunner on the 25th of June 2008.[4] Unlike most other mobile phone platforms, these phones are designed to provide end users with the ability to modify the operating system and software stack. Other Openmoko supported phones are listed here.

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I'm definitely interested in hearing about people's experiences with these. I had pre-ordered one of their development phones last year, but gave up because of the constant delays.

I kept up with the dev list for awhile, but there were a lot of complaints about the hardware - battery life in particular, so I stopped paying attention.

The one thing I'm a bit weary about is their build environment. Last I checked they use OpenEmbedded, which to put it plainly, blew chunks last I tried to use it. After 48 hours of not sleeping I gave up and switched to OpenWRT's new buildroot-ng which I found significantly easier to use.

I hear you, I spent all WEEK fighting with OpenEmbedded. Painfully, it is better than LTIB. Actually there is a sub-set of OE called Poky that is really solid. OE's problem is that the packages vary in quality - primarily in their ability to compile on multiple platforms - Poky picks the betters ones and has fewer platforms, it works very well.

So wait, does the new device run Android? Their site doesn't lead me to believe it does, and google searches only return stories of people failing to run Android on the last one.

The software stack was developed long before Android was around. There's a good graphic describing the software here: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:Software

I believe the are enabling android to run "beside" their stack.

Correct, OpenMoko uses the CacaoVM with GNUClasspath for Java - although it is primarily not a Java device. Android is running the DarvickVM which is not actually Java, and runs a Java syntax on top of it. Though the code is compatible, byte code is not, so binary packages for OpenMoko or Android will not run on each other. Thus the two stacks need to be side by side, or you need to rebuild all the packages from one for the other.

It runs Linux so you could probably make android work on it.

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