Ubuntu Mobile Announced

Placid writes "The BBC has up an article detailing the 'Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded' project which was announced by Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu's CTO, on the Ubuntu developers mailing list. Zimmerman stated that 'These devices place new demands on open-source software and require innovative graphical interfaces, improved power management and better responsiveness.' According to the article, Intel will have their finger in the pie too, as they've recently announced a prototype device running Ubuntu. Part of the project's goal is to maximise the power saving abilities of a planned low-energy chip codenamed Silverthorn. The chip will be just one-seventh the size of normal chips, and consume only 10% of the power of existing processor. What does this mean for projects such as OpenMoko? Healthy competition, or the beginning of the end?"

Competition

[janrinok]

Surely, this will be good for competition?

buy a phone

[Mariani]

Does anyone know when/where/how to get a hold of a phone capable of running an open os? Information is really scares on that subject, can seem to find many answers on the openmoko site. People are developing for it, so there must be a way to get a hold of one right?

Re:buy a phone

[Anonymous Coward]

They're pretty early in the development phase. I think they only recently finalized the hardware and got development units out to a couple key people. They're looking at a September date for making it available to the public.

You can buy the Neo1973 from FIC

[Anonymous Coward]

At the http://openmoko.com/ [openmoko.com] website after May 10th.

A nice thought.

[Lumpy]

Most embedded Linux installs are hand made. usually you do not need a full distro for an embedded device but a smaller subset to get the job done.

I hope that Ubuntu project can create something that is workable that also delivers where all other embedded linux distros fell on their face, Size and performance.

Honestly a kernel+busybox+your custom app is all that is needed for most embedded linux uses. and can be rolled together by your in house engineers in a day.

Now trying to make a inly multi-purpose low power generic device is a different story but is the exception in the world of embedded lnux.

More like Maemo than OpenMoko

[TobascoKid]

Looking at the article, this seems to be more about a version of Ubuntu for Web tablets instead of mobile phones. It looks like Intel are using Ubuntu for their Nokia N800 style device.

Re:Competition

[ClaesMogren]

I'm sure it will be good for the competition, and it will make more people interested in getting their applications to run on embedded devices. Ubuntu is generally good at contributing patches upstream and I'm sure this will give the GNOME Mobile And Embedded [gnome.org] initiative an extra push. It's nice to see free and open software becoming more widespread on other devices than just PCs.

Re:A nice thought.

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing i've noticed with embedded linux is that it tends to be very device centric. Each piece of hardware seems to have a community around it and its own distro. It seems that many projects end up duplicating 50% of the effort from others and that co-operation between this projects is often lacking or only by chance when somebody happens to own two or more Linux enabled devices.

I've used OpenPsion, Open Zaurus/pdaXrom, Familiar, OpenWRT, OpenSlug and Gumstix-buildroot on various platforms (Psion 5mx, Zaurus 5500/cl-1000, WRT54G, NSLU2 and gumstix) and found that each has its own quirks in the way the distro is setup and in what works and what doesn't. Some distros use uClibc buildroot, others use openembedded, some require you just to install a toolchain manually and others have their own scripts. This gives great variety to what software is available on different hardware despite the hardware being nearly identical.

What i'd love to see is a standard distro which takes care of building all the components which are always the same (e.g. nearly all the user applications) and has device specific bits that cover all the embedded Linux devices. I know openembedded pretty much does this but its such a pain to use and way beyond what the average user (and even many developers) will be prepeared to do. If Ubunutu can provide a standard distribution with the same GUI, the same config tools, the same /etc layout and someway of repackaging files depending on the firmware needs of the device this would be really nice.

Re:buy a phone

[N8w8]

Though it's not _completely_ open (a few proprietary kernel modules IIRC), I love my new toy, a Motorola A780, which runs Linux natively.

It runs a distro named EZX, which is based on a Montavista-modified Linux 2.4 kernel, a GNU-ish userland (glibc, etc.), and Qt Embedded as the graphics framework.

You can easily cross-compile apps for this EZX environment (mkezx.org). Even cooler is that work is being done to reverse engineer the closed parts, and run Linux 2.6 on the device (openezx.org). Besides the kernel, people are also working to make it run a completely different distro (angstrom-distribution.org).

Anyway, I love this device :)