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
- Open Source Initiative (OSI) Resists Software Freedom, Even by Attacking Its Own
- The OSI is compromised
-
- Links 28/08/2025: Chatbots Distorting/Fabricating History and Also Driving Suicide
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/08/2025: Back in Japan and Why "Hacker News" Sucks
- Links for the day
- A Much-Needed Wake-up Call to Users of Wordpress.com, Blogspot, Substack and All Those Other Outsourced (and Centralised) Platforms
- There are several lessons in there
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
- In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 27, 2025
- Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com, Slopfarms in Google News, and More
- Some readers of ours end up sending us links that are from slopfarms, not realising those are slopfarms
- Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Katrina Memories and Google Versus Software Freedom
- Links for the day
- Links 27/08/2025: Police Against Media Freedom in the UK, Energy-Hungry Countries Targeted by China
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows Fell to All-Time Lows in Egypt This Summer, Vista 11 Adoption Decreases While GNU/Linux Increases
- Vista 11 is going down rather than up
- Links 27/08/2025: Microsoft Demoralises Staff With Slop Demands, Leaving Mastodon Explained
- Links for the day
- 12 Hours Ago The Register MS Published a Fake (Paid-for) Article, But This One for a Change Did Not Promote a Ponzi Scheme
- There are also Free software alternatives, but they don't pay The Register MS for "synthetic" so-called 'journalism'
- More People Need to Call Out and Put a Stop to Serial Sloppers
- Unless slopfarms are stopped, people will read and share Microsoft propaganda made by chatbots
- Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Headphones and Tartarus
- Links for the day
- Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
- The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments
- GNOME "governance issues, staff reduction, etc." amidst Albanian whistleblowing and women trafficking
- Notice the connection to Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and GNOME
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, August 26, 2025
- Richard Stallman (RMS) Was Right About "Sideloading" in 1996
- We now have computers that treat booting GNU/Linux like an act of "Sideloading"
- Panama: Windows Down From 97% "Market Share" to Less Than 30%
- In 2009, Windows was measured at 97.24% (compared to 62.32% right now or less than 30% if one also counts Android)
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part I - Introduction to Impending Catastrophe (Microsoft Preventing People From Booting Non-Windows Systems)
- eight-part series
- Why Techrights is Slow Today (Bot Floods)
- We don't know if those bots are connected to LLMs (we have not checked), but that is a possibility
- Slopwatch: DDoS Slop, LinuxBSDos.com Spam, and Slopfarms in Google News, Including webpronews.com
- Among the news we also found fakes, albeit not so much today
- Links 26/08/2025: "Ballooning Debt" in France and "Transnational Repression in the UK"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 26/08/2025: Listening to Alcest and Google Doing Evil (Users Installing Software is "Sideloading" and Prohibited)
- Links for the day
- Links 26/08/2025: DNS Tampering and TikTok Layoffs
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Windows "Market Share" Overestimated
- Microsoft's income sources are shrinking
- We Shall See...
- My wife and I are hardly the first victims of Brett Wilson LLP
- This New Determination on a Case Echoes the Modus Operandi of Microsoft's Serial Strangler vs Techrights (Its Online Decision/Judgment Says Truth and Public Interest Defend the Publisher)
- Noel Anthony Clarke hopefully has enough money left to pay his victims, which include the publishers
- Going Offline
- There was life before the Net
- The Register MS Has Apparently Shut Down Its Office
- It is basically a fake address on the face of it
- There Are Also Expectations of IBM Layoffs Very Soon With "Narrative Control."
- Some of them mention Red Hat and how IBM failed to achieve anything substantial with that acquisition
- After at Least Two Rounds of Mass Layoffs in August Microsoft Said to Have "September Layoff Confirmed - Performance Based"
- Those "M5 level meetings" sound plausible
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, August 25, 2025