Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Was partying this week-end, so I completely missed the sepcs release and I'm late to the party, but...

Wow!

The thing that get me sold on the project :
- Sailfish OS now confirmed to at least be attempted
(Yay! I love full-blown GNU/Linux on smartphone! Was so sad when Palm/HP WebOS disappeared from market. Happy that there are still SFOS devices considered)
- Keyboard (well basically that was the whole point of the project. I loved it on my Palm/HP Pre-s, I'm happy to have it again on a SFOS deviced)
- Unlocked bootload - because if I buy it it's my device! I get to decide what I run ! So happy!


Then, the SoC : well seems that it's a popular one, so hopes for more maintenance/hacks down the line. (And its still a *mid*-range 6xx. Unlike Fairphone who are considering switching to *low* range 4xx for their potential future FP3). Also given the much lower power requirement of SFOS, it's still fine by me.

Big screen : **** I'll need to find/buy an even bigger holster for that phone :-D
But otherwise : nice! (I have huge hands so no big deal by me).

Big battery : Yeah ! Finally someone who does use "smaller component" as an excuse for "even thinner phone (you can cut cheese with it)" but instead for "more room for bigger battery".
Two more question :
- will it be behind a easy user replaceable back cover ? Or will it be an internal battery as you mentioned in the tablet thread ?
- if it's an internal, will there by a ribbon connector or something like this to make it at least replaceable by a motivated enough owner of some torx screwdriver ? or will it be only solder/desolder madness ?
- chances of having pogo-pins so we could add after market wireless chargers ?
(I still have from very efficient Palm/HP TouchStone circuitry at home)

Dual camera : plenty of interesting opportunity to play around with openCV and stereo depth, etc. - Yay !

Love the big space (RAM / Flash) and the bazillon of connections networks/etc.

Speaking of connection, like I asked in the the other thread :
- out of curiosity, how did you manage to connect the keyboard to the main PCB?

Again big thanks for you effort.
(Looks like this is going to be the 2nd device I'll be buying from you)

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

I use the N9 frequently for navigation too, it guided me trough several trips. Even if I try hard, I cannot see any burn ins of the navigation UI.

Yes the battery icons isn't visible on the lockscreen, but you can see it while browsing, messaging, using the terminal, reading, geocaching and in almost every other application. Of course leaving the bright display on every night (my girlfriend would murder me ;)) could really lead to burn ins.

On the other hand the technology should have improved even more. It was still quite young in 2011.

Of course if the price is remotely reasonable I will still buy the phone even without a beautiful AMOLED screen and just shed a silent tear.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Awesome!
I like the 5.5" size, it is still pocketable (any bigger would not easily fit into a pocket anymore, but 5.5" does).

One suggestion: please make the keyboard backlit.
I also hope it will be convenient to type with thumbs. (This is perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the GPD Pocket.)

Also, more RAM would be nice and useful.

I would definitely NOT want to use Android, but for the sake of "normal" users, I suggest to market it with Android too, similarly to how the Gemini is marketed as "Android and Linux", so that Android fans can buy it too.

I'm mostly okay with Sailfish, but would be nice if you allowed us to install other OSes too.

To be honest, I would also welcome a "full" Linux distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu, simply because they are MUCH better geared towards productivity, which is why I need the full keyboard in the first place. Currently Sailfish doesn't have ANY productivity apps which could benefit from the keyboard.

Personally, I would use the device for on-the-go coding, emailing, writing docs and maybe watching some episodes when I'm bored on the train.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

SFOS:
- It has a terminal to the underlying Linux.
- It supports keyboard (both TOHKBD or foldable full-sized bluetooth "Stowaway"/"Thinkoutside")
- It has SSH (and rsync)
It has all I need :-D

More seriously - well availability of some more advanced GUI or Office software would be a bonus.
But currently, the main drawback I see is that Ubuntu has more or less dropped the ball on "Ubuntu Touch" (and as this is still an ARM smartphone under the hood, libhybris running solution like "ubuntu touch" are mandatory).
So it's going to be difficult to bring Fedora/Ubuntu to this, SFOS seems the only way to get some "real" GNU/Linux.

Also chen rightfully said he wanted to keep the number of OSes options low, specially regarding OSes he doesn't use on smartphone and doesn't know well.

---

On the other hand, if all you need is a pocketable device with desktop-linux experience on it :
have a look at project pyra.

It's designed to by a portable-gaming console, but it has Debian as a standard OS, should be supported by other ARM32 distros, and should start shipping in the near future.

That should be a solution if you need LibreOffice or KDevelop on a device that fit is a (large) pocket.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

I can't wrap around my head that sailfish would be possible but say archlinux doesn't work... What's blocking that?
Many distros with ARM support...

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

This is actually my question from day 1, please educate me:

What is the barrier of porting a standard ARM Linux distribution on it? What's the technical difficulty?

And 2nd question is what is the cost/work needed doing so?

Thanks in advance!

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

The pyra is a cool project, but is not what I'd need: it's too bulky, the screen is resistive and the "gaming controls" are useless to me. And unfortunately it looks like a Neo900-like never-ending project. :(

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

The main problem is well summarized by Greg Kroah-Hartman's blog post. In short, on the driver level the Android fork of the Linux kernel is incompatible with the mainline Linux kernel. Thus, you can't write a single graphic driver that is compatible with both.

Since Android is more popular on phones than mainline Linux, everybody just writes graphic drivers for Android, not mainline Linux. (Note: there are very few drivers which had a version for the mainline Linux kernel, eg. the NVidia Tegra, and the OMAP SGX driver, perhaps more?)
Basically, nobody but Nokia invested in mainline GNU/Linux on ARM phones...
Even the Android userspace is basically incompatible with the userspace of "normal" desktop Linux distributions. (They use a different set of libraries, etc.) "Normal" distributions usually run a GNU system, while Android uses something called bionic. But the most troubling issue is with the graphic drivers.

So when you want to run a "normal" distribution (Fedora, Debian, Arch, whatever) on a phone, even if it has an ARM version, you have two choices: either get a mainline Linux driver for your chip (which almost nobody develops), or just use software rendering, resulting in bad user experience.

How Jolla does it (and how Ubuntu Touch and Plasma, etc. did it) is through something called libhybris which allows to create a "mix-and-match" system by combining the Android kernel and drivers with the userspace of a "normal" Linux distribution. It is basically a hack that allows us to run a GNU system on top of the Android kernel with hardware grahics acceleration, thus allowing to create a non-Android system from the Android kernel.

Needless to say, this hacky approach with libhybris is quite incompatible with the way how a "normal" Linux distribution delivers its kernel.

Also, chip vendors usually only support one specific (old) version of the kernel, with closed-source graphics drivers, and it almost never gets updated (or only gets minor fixes and security patches). They have no interest in maintaining a newer kernel for their old chips, so they just don't do it, with few exceptions (OMAP maybe?).

Hope this helps!

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Big thanks, that clarifies the issues...
Unfortunately it makes my hope sink as well.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Don't lose hope yet...

Everything is possible, it's just matter of time or the steps that need to take.

My goal is not just making a keyboard device, this is just a step forward from the Moto Keyboard, it's not the end.

This world needs something different, and we just had our little first step, I trust with all the experience and wisdom here, we can definitely achieve further.

So don't sink your hope for now. :)