Mobile Linux Not Just Android: Jolla, WebOS, and Firefox OS News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-13 09:57:51 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-13 09:57:51 UTC
Jolla
The fifth update of Sailfish OS, called Sailfish OS 1.0.5.16 Paarlampi has been released, coming with both interesting new features and bug-fixes.
Hello Jolla Enthusiasts. As you may know, Jolla is a project developed by former Nokia employees. The first Jolla smartphone is running on Sailfish OS, a modified Megoo Linux system, which is Android compatible, uses Wayland as the default display server , uses Nokia N9ââ¬Â²s Maliit touchscreen keyboard and impressive hardware specifications.
WebOS
It is a known fact that Palm’s mobile operating system dubbed webOS never really took off commercially. However, that is no indication that the team behind the OS did not have great ideas. In the latest, the team is rolling out its interesting (read: exciting) user interface ideas to the community. Known as Mochi, the project aims at the community to further work on it as the team was working on some intriguing ideas before HP decided to stall its plan for the same.
A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance between what HP was saying publicly and planning privately. Citing employees from within HP, the lawsuit alleges that the company didn't have plans to build webOS PCs or printers until at least the beginning of 2013, which would have contradicted its bold claims about flooding the market with webOS hardware.
It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions.
Firefox OS
Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla's continued relevance.
The images display a new lockscreen, as well as new SMS interfaces and other features. It’s a flatter look, with more transparencies, among other changes. There’s also a view of the EverythingMe-based context-sensitive search function.
Despite the fact that the newest Firefox OS version available on devices is Firefox OS 1.3, a preview of Firefox OS 2.0 is already available and it looks quite awesome, for an OS targeting low-range and mid-range devices.
There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla's Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven't owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone's concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla's platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- People Discuss Rumours of Mass Layoffs at IBM Becoming Public in 1-2 Weeks
- IBM is killing its brand or its "goodwill"
- The Old Days
- In the early days of this site (2006) it was mostly just a couple of people, plus comments
- Links 28/03/2026: Microsoft's LinkedIn a National Security Risk, Microsoft's Slop "Ambitions Face Investor Scrutiny Amid Soaring Costs"
- Links for the day
-
- No Daylight Saved
- Is there still any practical reason for this ritual?
- Microsoft Azure Does Not Have "Hiring Freezes", It Has Had Mass Layoffs Every Year Since 2020
- Things are always a lot worse than Microsoft formally or publicly acknowledges
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 27 Out of 200: Using the Tor Network to Hide From Consequences
- Only 1-2 weeks after the countersuit the Canadian attempted to deplatform several Web sites
- The Limits of Inclusion
- Inclusion with caution isn't "opinionated"; it's a defence mechanism, sometimes a survival instinct
- Almost 20 Years After Microsoft/Novell
- The mission has not changed, but the priorities evolve all the time
- LLM Slop Kills Sites, as Sites That Adopt Slop Are Doomed
- People won't subscribe to such sites and visit them if they recognise it's just slop
- Links 29/03/2026: Indonesia Cracks Down on Social Control Media Addiction, China Becomes World’s Scientific Superpower
- Links for the day
- Fedora at the Mercy of Microsoft Because of Back-Doored Kick-Switch Boot
- We'll soon revisit the defamation attacks on Torvalds
- Links 29/03/2026: Water Shortages and No Kings Rallies
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/03/2026: Return to Gopherspace, "Zen of Marking Playing Cards"
- Links for the day
- The Real XBox is Dead, So Microsoft is Calling Everything "XBox" Now
- It even wanted to run a campaign to convince everybody that XBox is not actually a console
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, March 28, 2026
- Open Web Destroyed by Centibillionaires, Says Anil Dash of Blogging Fame
- Blogging was going through its 'prime years' about 20 years ago
- "Linux" Slop Going Away, Microsoft et al Pay 'Linux' Foundation to Promote Slop
- It's a timely reminder that the Linux Foundation exists to promote whoever pays the Linux Foundation, even pedophiles and companies that attack the GPL
- Gemini Links 28/03/2026: "Finding My Base Tone", "Astrobotany", and BugoutBack/OFFLFIRSOCH
- Links for the day
- Links 28/03/2026: More Worldwide Bans on Social Control Media (Harms to Adolescents), Protests in US Against Dictatorship
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 26 Out of 200: Asking for Documents and Information You Already Have, Even Letters and E-mails That You Yourself Sent!
- barristers are expensive
- Gemini Links 28/03/2026: Echo Delay and 0x0.st
- Links for the day
- Rumours of More IBM Mass Layoffs at Beginning of April
- IBM is not doing well
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 27, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, March 27, 2026
- "Headcount" as Distraction From Mass Layoffs and Salary Reductions
- Things aren't looking well when one considers revenue is acquired, not earned
- "Linux" Slop Turning Rarer, New York Times Nowadays Contaminated With LLM Slop
- Another day has passed without much slop about "linux"
- Links 27/03/2026: Studying Whale Births, Apple is Cancelling Products, Cambodia Arrests Journalists Over Photographs
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/03/2026: GTD, Gopher Catchup, Gemini Crawlers, and "Slop Everywhere"
- Links for the day
- Mozilla Was Ruined Like Sirius Open Source Was Ruined - From the Top Down
- Mozilla will never return to its Free software roots
- Nokia Could Never Recover From Microsoft
- It's very important to remember what really happened
- Why Techrights and Many Other Sites Stopped Doing April Fools’ Day Articles
- Well before slop (made by LLMs) it was "bad optics" to have satire or humour in a site, irrespective of the day of the year
- President Not-Cocaine Campinos Notified of Historic EPO Strikes (Thousands of Workers Not Coming Back to the Office)
- Please do pay attention to how the media treats these strikes in Europe's second-largest institution
- Slides From the Presentation Discussing EPO Strikes Until End of June or Until End of 2026 (Maybe Next Year Too)
- More to come soon (later today)
- IBM Cuts Are Everywhere (Global), the Aim is to Lower the Pay
- Because the revenues keep falling (IBM buys other companies' revenues using borrowed money)
- Perpetual Strikes to Begin at European Patent Office (EPO), Large Majority Votes for Strikes Any Day of the Week
- Approved industrial actions [...] Notice how none of the media or even so-called 'IP' blogs write about it
- Mozilla is Not a Privacy Company, Mozilla is Run by GAFAM Executives and Managers Who Came From American Surveillance Companies
- Would you trust a VPN they claim to be "free"?
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 25 Out of 200: That Time Matthew J. Garrett Got Temporarily Banned/Suspended From Twitter
- That he gets banned from large social control media platform is hardly surprising given his combative communications
- Ubuntu Started as Free With ShipIt, Now It Becomes Payware That Exploits Debian Volunteers (Slaves)
- "Ubuntu" the distro now replaces the GNU components inherited from Debian with a bunch of Microsoft GitHub (proprietary) things that reject reciprocal licences
- Last Night The Register MS Published a Fake Article. It Mentioned "AI" 27 Times.
- Paid-for nonsense! [...] What's left of once-respectable news sites actively harms society
- Links 27/03/2026: Google Executive (GAFAM, US, Surveillance) "Named the New BBC Head", Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/03/2026: "Being Busy" and "Posting Again"
- Links for the day
- GNOME Has No "Real" Executive Director, Only an IBM (Perma)'Interim' One With No Openings in Sight
- GNOME is having financial problems
- Microsoft Experiencing "Leadership Exodus"
- Microsoft's current position is no better than Meta's (Facebook)
- GNU/Linux Distros Should Reject "Age Verification" and Uphold Software Freedom for Users
- It's not about protecting children
- Slop Plunge
- we can already "smell the blood" of the so-called 'AI industry'
- IBM Media Puff Pieces While Layoffs Go On and On
- Has the PR industry absorbed the press?
- Media Says Microsoft Hiring Freezes, But There Are Already Microsoft Layoffs
- They want the public to talk about Microsoft as if it's just not hiring when it is actually firing
- Richard Stallman lynchings: Sruthi Chandran splitting Debian
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 26, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, March 26, 2026