Breaking News

26 June 2013

Alpha2 Announcement

Dear Community,

Today we're releasing an alpha 2 version of our work. We have worked very hard through the last months to achieve our goals of having a usable device running Open webOS. Due to a lot things we aren't as far as we thought we could be. Nevertheless we have some important features implemented which warrants the alpha 2 release today. These are:

Video acceleration for card web apps (not perfect yet)
Audio playback support (includes HTML5 audio support)
Telephony support through the Android telephony stack (based on the great work of the Ubuntu Touch project. Thank you very much guys!)
- Mostly not available through the UI, but if you put a SIM card with unlocked PIN into your device you will notice the telephony indicator.

All in all we're basing our porting efforts on top of the libhybris project (see https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris) which enables us to utilize the Android hardware drivers to support most hardware dependent things (like accelerated graphics, telephony, sensors, GPS, ...). Our developers are contributing to the libhybris project in a continuous manner so we can share things developed as part of the libhybris project with its other users (Mer, Salfish, Ubuntu Touch, ...). For example libhybris is the same thing which powers Ubuntu Touch on all the different Android based devices.

We already achieved a lot but are still not at the point of having a usable day phone or tablet as we're missing a lot work on the application side. There is already existing work to port preware to enyo 2 but there are still a lot other areas which need help. If you're a webOS enthusiast or like our project feel free to contribute (you find all ways to contact us at http://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Communications). We need all the help we can get to achieve our final goal of having a usable phone/tablet!

If you want to try it out on your Galaxy Nexus smartphone (codename maguro) you will find instructions and a link to the images below.

Galaxy Nexus (maguro)
- Images for installation
- Installation instructions

We created a list with things we need help with at http://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Help_Wanted

The webOS ports team!

Screenshots:

Home Screen

Multiple Applications

QT5 Applications

Settings Application

Wifi/Telephony Working

Overview

WebOS Internals has set up a dedicated team for:

System updates for legacy TouchPad devices using
the webOS Community Edition (WOCE) release.
Moving forward to well-documented mobile devices with
readily available hardware drivers using the Open webOS 1.0 release.

The team is called WebOS Ports (webos-ports.org)
and is led by Tom King (ka6sox).

IRC: #webos-ports on Freenode
Bug Tracker: Issue Tracking
Twitter: @webosports
Github: github.com/webOS-ports