Nokia Researcher Puts Firefox OS On Raspberry Pi 75
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by
timothy
from the obscure-sports-quarterly dept.
from the obscure-sports-quarterly dept.
judgecorp writes "Mozilla's mobile phone operating system only exists in an early beta form, but Oleg Romashin, a researcher at Nokia, has already got it working on the Raspberry Pi and posted video to prove it. We don't think this indicates any alternate strategy for Nokia if Windows Phone doesn't pan out, but it does show that Firefox OS is portable, and the Pi is capable, and both can be played with — which will please both Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. And the Firefox OS work in progress is available for download (direct tarball link)."
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Not sure why it is taking you so long. I ordered two from element14, took two days and three days respectively.
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Well Played (Score:1)
Raspberry Pi, Nokia, Mozilla, Firefox all in one slashdot article - nice work.
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Apple's going to use Bitcoins to patent the idea.
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224MB memory? Forget it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but with only 224MB memory, this is a bad idea. I've tried multiple browsers on Pi -- including full-blown like Firefox or Chromium, and minimalistic like Midori; the only one that's actually usable is elinks. Especially if pages as bloated as Slashdot are involved.
Gooseberry, if it ever becomes something more than vapourware, might get into an usable range (512MB minus video memory).
It's interesting how no graphical browser of today can cope with that little memory, when back in the day we could browse fine with 4MB.
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The mobile browsers work OK in that much memory. My ipad1 can browse fairly well and "only" has 256mb of ram.
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Looks like we have different definitions of "fairly well". After an aeon or two of swapping, it manages to render Slashdot after all, but I don't have that much patience. And, on many pages (sadly, Slashdot excluded), elinks is actually not that bad.
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Slashdot doesn't render well on any mobile browser. I've tried Dolphin, Chrome, Firefox and the stock one on Android 4.0.4 (s3) and (most of those browsers on) 2.3.4 and 2.3.7 and it's horrible. I'm actually quite suprised at how little effort has been spent on this site for mobile. In particular, if you try and click on your user name at the top right of the screen you get the `options` and `accounts` links; it's impossible to click the username itself. Also, each subject doesn't wrap properly, forcing
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From a technical POV, it's surprising just how much the Slashdot site sucks, given that it's written by and for geeks. Not only does it not work very well on mobile, but it also doesn't support Unicode. As a result, copying and pasting quotes will often result in garbage being inserted where there should be dashes, smart quotes, or other special characters. Come on, it's 2012; there's absolutely no excuse for this.
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it's surprising just how much the Slashdot site sucks
this is /.'s USP - if the site would work flawlessly it would feel like a boring news aggregator...
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Do not confuse geeks with website designers. It's just the same as assuming that since you can
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Firefox on Nokia N9 renders well and is responsive (Score:2)
Slashdot renders great on the last ~3 versions of Firefox mobile on my Nokia N9, (which are provided via OTA updates). Ajax and all, it is very responsive, while the rendering quality seems very well done. (It was good before those versions also, but it seems zippier and more responsive with each version since). Firefox on the N9 is a joy.
Disclaimer: I made websites for a living, so I figure I am fairly discerning.
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Slashdot is horribly broken on mobile, but most other sites that aren't daft work well on an ipad1. It's certainly fine for casual use.
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In other words, the way it used to be, when 256MB was a blessing and not a hindrance.
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Re:224MB memory? Forget it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting how no graphical browser of today can cope with that little memory, when back in the day we could browse fine with 4MB.
Back in the day, a good practice was limiting your entire page to under 100kb. Now, you're lucky if a page clocks under 1mb even with all the caching going on. Don't get me started on sites like the Huffington Post or Destructiod.
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It seems to be very lightweight; already runs on Linux; and it's based upon a new architectural design, and a brand new rendering engine. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle to build, time/dependencies-wise.
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Thats about par with low end Android phones and tablets. My phone and tablet (each $150 or so) have around that 256MB RAM mark. Both seem to run the latest Firefox Mobile Beta fine.
Optimization is always necessary, especially when something is written for x86 and compiled to ARM.
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That's because everything's done by the browser nowadays. Whereas in the past, you'd have static pages that the server dishes up with each interaction, today, you have the browser rendering all the interactions, with the server supplying only the variable data.
For example, if this was old Slashdot, if you clicked on a comment, it opened up in a new page. For new Slashdot, if you clicked on a comment, the comment now opens up in the current page, while the rest of the page is reformatted (lenghtened, shorten
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zRam (Score:2)
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1) turn off javascript, it will help a shitton
2) go look at webpages from the 4 meg days, now go look at a modern site, see how that works?
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0. install AdBlock, configure it to axe not just ads but also all trackers and similar sleaze. And especially all those Fecesbook/Google+/Twatter/whatever "likes".
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Farnell seem to be quicker at fulfilling orders than RS - plus you get a t-shirt.
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wrong - both RS and farnell are on continuous manufacturing at approx 4k each per week [ http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1588 [raspberrypi.org] ] there is still a large backlog to get though though.
RS seem to be worse
farnell have been delivering within the week for some people.
yes the drivers need a bit more work .
yes there is no accelerated x so that runs slow -
yes they work fine if you have a good PSU and are lucky with usb keyboards
Re:Trickleware (Score:4, Informative)
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I ordered two on two separate orders, one took two and the other three days.
Nokia researcher? (Score:1, Funny)
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I would be utterly astonished if Microsoft was paying any attention to the Raspberry Pi "platform" at all. They can't even get the Slashdot commentards to take it seriously.
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the article doesn't mention under what capacity oleg did the porting work, pretty much that they just pulled from linkedin that he worked on meego browser.
Nice (Score:2)
The Pi is capable? (Score:3)
Underpowered, with hardware issues (Score:1)
Not enough memory - As some other commenters noted, the 256mb memory is not enough to run X. Forget web browsing, unless you want to wait minutes to load websites. With Scratch loaded, which is one of the advertised used cases, there's only 10-20mb memory left, with the 240-16 memory split.
Not USB 2.0 compatible - This is a major issue. I tried about a dozen keyboards, most don't work at all, the one that is semi usable repeats keys
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I quickly abandoned LXDE, installed xmonad, now I have 50-60megs left in the same scenario. While I love xmonad, and it's the only WM I use on all my linux machines, it's not for everyone. But even under xmonad, web browsing is at best super slow with Midori. Chromium is completely useless.
We can get a lot of things to"run" on the RPi, or a machine with 256mb ram. But the real question is, can
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But even under xmonad, web browsing is at best super slow with Midori. Chromium is completely useless.
With luck this will spur the development of an actually light weight web browser.
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As you said, it works well from the command line. If I just keep it running, it does not overheat. The overheating issues showed up when I was cross-compiling some packages. But the heat sinks seem to have fixed that for now.
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As some other commenters noted, the 256mb memory is not enough to run X.
That's quite plainly bullshit. I run X on a P200MMX with 128MB of RAM. X itself is quite efficient unless you start loading up kdelibs or some shit.
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But it's not for running Midori, Scratch or gimp.
Raspberry Pi has 3 known USB faults (Score:1)
Three types of USB-related faults have finally been accepted by the Foundation, after a long struggle during which they denied everything for months:
A. Limited endpoints:
It can handle only 8 USB endpoints, which means that you can run out of endpoints when plugging in just 2 or 3 devices (a hub just uses up more endpoints and makes this still worse), and then the entire USB system and your networking dies.
B. Data loss:
The USB driver requires realtime response from the Linux kernel when handling USB's split
...soon to be a ex-Nokia researcher (Score:2)
In other news (Score:2)