Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port

geek.com

69 points11031a22 comments

With any windowing system running so slow, how will porting all that to JavaScript improve matters?

However let's turn that the other way: One of the Pi's cooler features is its digital I/O's. Will this mean they'll add GPIO support to Firefox OS then? And maybe to Firefox, too?

"This web site wants to control your hand-soldered peripherals. [Allow] [Don't allow]" - Cool!

I didn't notice any part of that being "so slow". Sure, the system UI isn't quite as snappy as it could be, but Mozilla has several months to work on it. Usually most of the visible performance optimizations happen near then end, and I bet they'll get it pretty smooth.

Indeed, the Android port is actually faster than my phone.

The actual Broadcom port of 4.0? I haven't seen anywhere that it's actually available to acquire (which is too bad, because it would be quite useful for the project I'm working on).

Well, I meant from the video the developer put up - I'd love to get a hold of it too (would like to try splitting HDMI and putting Android over many).

There's a lot of work going on performance-wise right now, especially on the gfx side. We should be seeing some serious performance benefits soon; honestly, I'm amazed that WebGL apps run as well as they do right now -- they're getting a huge boost soon.

Telefonica will use Firefox OS on feature phones with specs that are below Raspberry Pi.

There is a difference between running Ubuntu and just running a little OS using Linux kernel.

FxOS could very well add GPIO. Bluetooth is currently in the works for FxOS v1 (it'll be certified apps only for v1, but it should expose RFCOMM sockets all the way up through JS, so the potential is there), and host-mode USB has been talked about for later versions. Basically, the idea is "if it's the phone, we should be able to access it". As things branch out, hopefully that'll morph into "if it's on the hardware, we should be able to access it"

X on Raspbian is not GPU accelerated. Since the CPU (but not the GPU!) is a bit anemic even by current ARM SoC standards, that's a big deal.

Firefox OS is accelerated, running on top of OpenGL ES. :)

Nice. Another nice board to run on is the Panda Board. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

It is a popular board at Mozilla to do development and testing on.

I dunno, you can buy 5 $35 raspberry pis for the price of one $200 pandaboard. $200 approaches the territory of being plausibly enough to build or purchase a full PC.

I imagine the comment was aimed at those who already have pandaboards. It wasn't a salespitch.

I was quite disappointed in my RPi buying experience, living in the US. I'm still waiting for it to arrive (despite preordering the minute the sites came back online). They notified me that it was being shipped a couple weeks ago, told me that shipping would be about 12 weeks. The exchange rate threw me for a heck of a shock, with my RPi costing about $50 minus shipping.

The RPi might be the soup du jour, but it's an incredibly frustrating device to get your hands on. At least the Pandaboard can be placed in my hands; for all I know the RPi might not even exist at all.

Wow, where did you order yours?

I have 2 of them, one each from the 2 places taking preorders on day 1 and I wasn't first in line or anything. I got both of mine about the middle of June and they didn't cost any more than expected.

I got mine from RS, preordered the week it went on sale. My cousin ordered his a month later and got it last month. 12 week shipping to the midwest. Crazy.

I orderer from RS in the first week and got it months ago for a total cost of $41 including shipping to Israel.

The price difference is due to 35GBP = 55USD currently. To quote the email I received: "Delivery Type Desc Standard Delivery (Despatch expected within 12 week(s))"

Right, but the theoretical price of a pi is 35USD, not 35GBP.

Just checked several vendors listed on www.raspberrypi.org and none are available presently.

Have to agree... at $200, and AMD E-350 ITX board + 8GB of ram is cheaper, and more capable.

True. But you get what you pay for. The Raspberry Pi is extremely low end. Slow CPU, tiny bit of memory.

If that works for you then awesome.

However, if you want something that is more in line with today's mid to high end phones then the Pandaboard probably comes closer.

That glass skull demo was pretty damn impressive. I don't think my primary computer 5 years ago could have rendered it that well.

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