Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

I want to share a few thoughts about SailfishOS, alien dalvik and the Nokia N9, feel free to tear me apart.

1) alien dalvik on N9: I don't know how alien dalvik works yet, as i don't own a jolla phone so i cannot analyze how it works. But one thought i had was, if it would be possible to just run alien dalvik on an N9 as in: copy it over, run and see what happens. This might require the Nitdroid dual-boot kernel or another modified kernel and i don't know how SailfishOS being wayland based comes into this calculation. But it might be worth a try.

1.5) Also it is very easy to run the original dalvikvm from nitdroid on the N9, so if alien dalvik does not work we could probably reuse their classpath - which is one of the biggest problems with running android apps on the N9 and the reason why we don't have a compatibility layer that supports many apps.

2) SailfishOS on N9: The biggest issue of porting SailfishOS to the N9 is drivers. We have seen some people who have been able to start the SDK version of SailfishOS on the N9 and it seems the os is at least working but not very usable due to low speed. But now the interesting part: Jolla has plans to give us instructions on how to run SailfishOS on Android based devices. The technique they are using is that they can load android drivers via libhybris. We have nitdroid drivers for the N9. We might be able to use that as a starting point!

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Why jolla will help devs to prot sailfish to android device not to n9 ?
jolla team made n9 , and now they don't help devs to port sailfish to n9

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Yes they do help indirectly via merproject. Also there is a good buissiness reason for them to help port to Android devices because that way they may get more attention in media and endusers. The more endusers install Sail the more intrests from the big manufactors to release SailfishOS on theyr phone. That means income for Jolla.

Porting to N9 is does not give them any income, because as we all know Nokia smarthphone division is sold..

Don't forget the fact that this company is less than 100 persons and when they say "they will port to X/Y Androiod device" it is because its way easier to port to this devices, thanks to libhybris+cyanogonmod. N9 does not use any of that and that means they have to redo driver implementations for closed drivers from Nokia (GPS/NFC and so on).

And about Android compability layer: We don't know if this discussions about "sailfishos will be ported to your Android device" actually means you will get Android compability layer for free? or the maps/apps. This is because of thirdparty licenses.

AFAIK Android stuff is licensed from Myriad... HERE Nokia and so on...

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

they have made clear what is left to do to port sailfish to the n9, i was just thinking about if there are easier ways

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Alien Dalvik and Here Maps are proprietary technology and its very doubtful they will come on the N9.
Copying it is probably illegal as well.

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Another question/possibility, but in the opposite direction - would it be possible to copy the Skype telepathy plugin from Harmattan to Sailfish OS?

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Alien Dalvik is actually on a separate repository from the rest of the stuff to make it harder to get to, but not impossible. Someone with a real Jolla (tm) could still get to the bits for N9/50 users.
Please do not do this, Alien Dalvik is licensed, third-party software.

The jPhone is an Android device - its initial BSP was very likely to be Android. Sailfish runs on top of it via libhybris. Cool, eh?

There is some speculation that due to the nature of the adaptation, Myriad Alien Dalvik depends on some bits in-kernel.

Sailfish is already ported to the N9/50, the patterns are in the repos. It was the demo device for some time after all ;)

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

if you own both a jolla device and an n9 device i suppose they cannot stop you from copying it over, regardless of licensing, but i might be wrong. after all my intend is not do do something evil/illegal, but i think trying out such a thing can not be forbidden (unless you upload the binaries to the internet or such)

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

Probadly not library incompabilitys also nemo is armv7hf and if I remember correct harmattan is compiled with soft float.

Re: Thoughts about N9, SailfishOS and alien dalvik
 

but some bits still not working so its upto us make it work:

https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo/Status/Matrix