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Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is running an article stating that ten companies have recently banded together to launch a cross-industry consortium to further advance embedded Linux platforms. They hope to make 'Linux into a plug-and-play mobile phone platform comparable to Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS, but with greater flexibility and lower costs. The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.' Meanwhile, some market research suggests that Linux is already giving Windows Mobile a run for its money."
I had better be able to play Tux Racer on these phones... otherwise, what good are they?
C'mon. If you're an embedded developer, what're you going to (want to) go for? A closed-source, royalty-based model, or an open-source, royalty-free model -- especially wherein you're able to modify the kernel to your whim? MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.
"why oh why can't I just get a phone that works as a phone?!"
There, hopefully that'll stop this discussion from having 80% comments like this...
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
OSX is based on BSD.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.
i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.
maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.
Symbian should be the real target here. Mobile Windows is very resource hungry. An embedded Linux for mobile devices that is stingy with resources to conserve battery life would be a welcome addition.
You guys must all be new here, else I would have seen:
Yes, But do they run Linux......
This will be a boon to mobile application developers! Symbian is basically controlled by one vendor - Nokia, and Windows Mobile obviously is controlled by Microsoft. Both OSes have their advantages and their problems. Symbian typically requires a unique executable to be built for every device. Windows needs a *slightly* beefier hardware platform (8MB minimum). Tools-wise Windows is in much better shape than Symbian. Embedded Linux could give both a run for their money. It will offer better tools (by far) than Symbian - almost on a par with Windows tools most likely -- and it will offer lighter resource requirements than Windows. The smart phone vendors should be all over this. It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Yes, all you need to od to get your new LiPs phone up and running is manually edit your hosts.conf with your 52 digit personal PIN and then PGP encode it and symlink it to blah blah blah.....
Just kidding! Actually this had me worrying for a bit until the magic words
"open standards created by industry groups"
appeared. It would be all to easy to take existing linux code and kludge it together with a pile of proprietary, closed/patented kernel hacks or libraries so that you end up with something nearly as closed as Pocket PC. Sure, it'd support more open standards and such but it wouldn't really be any kind of gain for Linux as a whole.
It will be interesting to see if this pans out - most companies like their little secrets to ensure that they're the only ones with "groovy new feature X" on their products.
Still, as long as I can actually make *phone calls* I wouldn't be too bothered I guess.
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
... in the US, at least. Look at how Verizon Wireless cripples phones' feature sets. Was the ROKR's 100 song limitation resulting from Apple's desire to not have it compete with its Ipods, or was it the desire of the wireless carriers to not impact their ringtone business, or a little of both? I would not be surprised to see embedded linux being used to drive down device costs, but as a platform to provide new wireless features, it seems that time and time again, the U.S wireless carriers expect to extract fees.
The standardization on GSM in Europe and other places would seem to invite the possibility of a market where you bring your own phone (versus having it generally tied to a provider via a protocol), and this could foster new apps running on linux phones, but GPRS does not provide a lot of bandwidth to do interesting things.
I guess syncing PIM and email stuff is all well and good, but for new and inventive applications, I would not be too optimistic
ostiguy
Can I get it for my laptop? Seriously...
KDE/Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird. Open Office. All huge.
Deleted
i call bullshit on this troll... compile with gcc == your end product must use gpl???
I know that Symbian is a "bad" OS, after all its only a reliable ground up operating system that has had the misfortune to have been created in Europe and be closed source.
But given that it has nearly 3/4 of the market and is clearly the dominant player, and its supported by companies that embrace open-source... shouldn't there be more OSS support for Symbian rather than an obsession with having Linux as the OS?
Think of Symbian as the Mac OSX for mobiles, but with Windows Marketshare.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The biggest problem I have seen with Linux is its too specific.
I have seen wonderful one shot solutions to numerous problems, ranging from a simple shell script to full applications.
Every single problem appears to have 10x different alternative variations on the solution.
If OSS people could work together and specify their problems and develop a general solution to the problem at hand, then linux will work for the masses.
People just don't want to "try before they buy" or "find the best one that suits you" for 16 different word processors, they want to get the one that will do the job. They don't want to have to worry about the distro choice because all software marked "Linux compatible" should work on it (without worrying about RPM TGZ and however many upyourarse variations there may be).
I have been examining Ubuntu rather closely recently and whilst I like what it offers, I'm still a newbie and find it confusing to examine projects - I can get things from my synaptic installer and I can add repositories to make more things available, but I still can't suss out how to go to the applications' homepage and download/run a single package - from a Windows perspective, I have come to trust the programs more when I can download them directly from the authors homepage, I don't like to get from secondary sources.
I realise theres probably a really simple super whizzbang command line sequence to do it and I've gone down along this route and looked into things like alien (for bringing in rpms), but why the hell is there such a conflict between packages, its all for Linux afterall.
When I'm in Linux I feel like I'm operating a betamax.
liqbase
Yep, it's an old troll, one of a dozen or so perennial troll posts that get pasted in every so often.
I seem to remember that there used to be more of that particular troll, though. I think quite a bit has been left out...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I have to wonder why a telephone needs an OS. In an environment where CPU power is an incredibly valuable resource, responsiveness is essentiual and there are none of the complications of device drivers and hard disks, surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You meant "OS X".
w00t
It's a good job we have you around, with your extra sharp wits to detect trolls for us all. Where would we be without someone to post replies to obvious trolls?
After reviewing the GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
What the hell are you talking about? Exactly what part of the GPL license makes your lawyers think that compiling code with gcc will force you to release the code under the GPL?
Either you need to change your lawyers or you're trolling. That stament is really, really stupid.
So is there actually a decent linux smart phone with Qwerty keyboard AND WLAN on the market (think latest iPaq or Nokia e61) cause I'd totally want to buy that.
I'm eyeing the Nokia e61 (Windows mobile is out of question) but I'd really rather get a Qtopia based device...
well sorry, but i have better things to do that read every slashdot post.
My opinion is that if the market cannot embrace new technologies, then the market must undergo a paradigm shift. If current providers of mobile service cannot embrace advancements, new providers must be started. If manufacturers will not develop newer, more powerful devices, new manufacturers must start producing. Hell, if someone can get a decent hardware patent for a next-generation embedded Linux platform that sells well because it implements the newest hardware, you can bet Microsoft and Verizon will cry... A lot.
Do you Gentoo?
I have been examining Ubuntu rather closely recently and whilst I like what it offers, I'm still a newbie and find it confusing to examine projects - I can get things from my synaptic installer and I can add repositories to make more things available, but I still can't suss out how to go to the applications' homepage and download/run a single package - from a Windows perspective, I have come to trust the programs more when I can download them directly from the authors homepage, I don't like to get from secondary sources.
'Fraid you can't have it both ways. You can have free choice to do it just the way you please, or you can have It Just Works and nothing to worry about. If you get your software from your distro's repository, you can be sure that the distributor has tested the software and made sure it will install to all the right places on your system, compiled it, packaged it and worked out all the necessary dependencies so that it can all be handled automatically. Doing it that way is simple and easy, but sometimes restrictive.
If you get it from the author's website, you'll probably have to compile it yourself, handle the dependencies yourself, and install it yourself. Doing it that way gives you complete freedom, and is difficult, confusing and not much fun except for hackers and geeks.
I might add that if you don't trust your distributor's repository, you have a big problem. You don't trust these guys to supply your apps, but you do trust them to supply your computer's basic OS?
If it's at all possible to do so, you should get your software from your distributor's repository. Only go direct to the author's website if this is not possible; you'll save yourself an awful lot of bother.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I was thinking that this wouldn't succeed until Verizon, et al., can use the standard platform to turn off anything at re-route it though their wireless pay-to-play system.
Your ROKR comment is the key reason why full-price phones and a la carte service would be a boon to consumers. Sadly, we live in a WalMart US market, where saving a few dollars now (free $100 phone) and paying extra each month in add-on fees is worth more than spending the money to get an unencumbered product. In some ways it makes sense for the cheap phones, but if I'm looking at a $500 PIM/phone, that $100 looks less and less like a bargain.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I download and run things for windows without having some complicated pathway, why can't Linux be the same?
:(
Its not that I don't trust the repository, its commonly that I am reading a site about programX and I want to try it. Not everything is in the repository, infact the majority of small OSS projects aren't there.
Currently I have to come away from the website open synaptic, do a search and see if the software is there (usually with some flicking around to confirm its actually what I need and that its the right version) then I have to download it, then play the fun game of which frikkin menu has it gone into just to run a program once and go "nope, not good enough uninstall, or yer I like that." Uninstall is backwards, except I have to wade through lists of things I haven't installed just to find the ones I have to uninstall it.
In Windows, the same thing really is point click [DOWNLOAD NOW], Select mirror, Next Next Next - "Start->All Programs->Author->ProgramX" Hmmmmmm do I like this? nope, right Control Panel/Addremove and its gone, or keep it.
Its just frustrating and confusing and I thought I was comfortable with computers, its the most complicated "user" oriented OS I have ever tried to use.
Now for the rub, I love the principles of OSS. I am sticking with it and persevering because I believe in what can be achieved with it. I run OSS as much as possible and routinely scout around sourceforge or freshmeat for new little projects (hence my frustration at synaptic). I just wish Linux was as simple to play with as Windows
liqbase
Not wanting to sound harsh but Linux is not nessecarily "Intended for the masses". There is no one Linux OS - everyone is free to patch together they're own collection of tools and utilities and make their own distro. This freedom is what leads to all these conflicting package systems - Distro A might be using teh linux kernel but have a completely different setup to DIsto B. The source code might need to be compiled differenmtly or customised, or there might be some kind of custom configuration manager that keeps track of installed software ( I won't say regis..regi..I won't say it!). But then that's both teh joy and pain of open, free and fully customiseable software.
Over time, groups tend to converge on a particular system since it's proven to work and work well (no point re-inventing the wheel!). And so over time we see particular package systems become popular and more featured (RPB and DEB for example).
But for now, if you aren't prepared to get to grips with the command line or just don't have the time (or someone that you can blackmail into doing your bidding!), then don't use Linux. Come back later!
Anyway, just to stay on topic, the ideal behind a set of standards is to avoid the kind of problems you described. To give a broad set of rules and guidelines so that however custom your particular tool or utility is, it will work with all the standard programs your phone might have (text messaging etc) and present a common user interface.
Whether this standard will acheieve that is another issue!
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
Those guys will sit and analyze all the challenges of software abstraction across phones... Their marketing guys will think how to build a developper community... Hmmm..
All they are setting out to do is reinvent J2ME (Java Micro Edition).
The way to contrast MSFT and Symbian is by combining a Linux core, an excleenent user interaction shell, and fullest support to the latest J2ME specifications. Not leaving any J2ME optional package out. The J2ME specification has everything developpers need. Unfortunately most phones do a very partial work in supporting the existing specifications.
* The Kernel should be standardized by these folks.
* The user experience shell is where each vendor can innovate.
* The J2ME stack exists with third party and must be very aggresively implemented, as well as optimized to the hardware. Possibly a higher level of widgets can be established, similar to SWIFT.
This combination can be established quickly and can effectively destroy the current smartphones OSs. Otherwise to start from scratch a standartization process between giants... don't hold your breath.
I always find it amusing when US companies are going to set standards, or develop working groups for mobile phone technologies. Why? Because it seems that the US has one of the most crippled mobile telecommunications system in the western world.
Countries in Europe can have roaming mobile phones between borders that were still fighting a war to the death just over 50 years ago, while the US can't even do it properly between towns (let alone states).
Nothing really insightful here, but always something that comes to my mind.
How about an open source calling plan?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Your issue here isn't with Linux. It's with package management. There are several different package managers out there -- Debian (.deb), Red Hat (.rpm), Gentoo (.???), Slackware (.tgz), as well as their spin-offs (eg., Mandrake, which also uses .rpm). The system I'd suggest is Ubuntu -- it's got a really nice setup, is very user-friendly, and uses .deb, which is far-and-away the easiest-to-use package manager in Linux-land. Debian also happens to have -- by far -- the largest software repository out there. True, everything isn't in it, but damn close to everything is. And far, far more than Windows share/free/etc-ware. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
if you look carefully at the picture of the ROAD "linux clamshell" linked from the article, you will see the top left hand of the window saying something like "Win.... ROAD" - and the GUI is clearly a Windows (clone?).
talk about reimplementing the dominant paradigm.....
The most important missing feature of the "global mobile phone network" is interoperability. There isn't even a standard format for ringtones or wallpaper, let alone downloadable applications. Open data formats are the key to opening phones as a single platform that any developer can reach with products and services. Otherwise it costs way too much to enter the market. That status quo serves the giant phone companies, both HW and network operators, who can afford to compete, and prefer to compete only with other giants they can "work with". Linux phones have lots of other value, both to developers and users. The insistence on open data formats as part of "Linux culture" and our existing software base is the most important Linux "feature". Because even with great success, it will be many years while Linux is a minority phone OS. But interoperable standards can arrive within a year or two, given enough pressure.
--
make install -not war
I dunno where you get your facts. I don't know anybody that has a cell phone, and can't use it anywhere in the US. Sure...there are some dead spots here and there...not a lot of towers in rural places, etc. But, I can take any phone I've had to any state in the US and use it just fine.
Ok, now many of our phones don't work internationally, but, the majority of people in the US will never travel internationally. In Europe, hell, you can cross the borders of 2-3 countries on a day's drive...not something you do in the US. So, international useage isn't that important to the average US citizen...he'll never see outside the US borders. This influences a LOT of things over here....not just phone standards used.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I second this; I did Smartphone 2002/2003 work for Orange for a couple of years.
:-) but I bet they would find smartphone easier to manage.
I was very busy, and every now and then I had a go on symbian only to get "wth? Now what?"; the whole symbian thing was an incomplete model of a cut-down psion3 system, which made sense in the psion3 but not a symbian phone. Anyway, I never got very far in the little time I didn't have. Never mind "dip a toe in" with symbian you had to nearly drown before you could get anywhere.
Smartphone on the other hand was a doddle, there was no more to "know" than made sense, the tools were readily available and logical; the api's happened to be familiar (from my windows delphi days) and it really wasn't very hard to get going, not to mention the convenient emulators.
There are lots of smart symbian developers out there and I don't want to comment on whether or not they are smarter then me
Having said all that the real hard thing with smartphone was getting technical details out of microsoft, how many times I wished I had "the source", so linux phones, with the well designed base system would be a real boon.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
When can I license the Access PalmOS/Linux that Palm has morphed into?
--
make install -not war
When I start a native Symbian application on my phone, it starts instantly.
When I start a J2ME application, even a trivial one like a world clock, it takes 5-10 seconds.
Until that problem is fixed, J2ME is not going to be the answer.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The US is different, not good or bad. While Verizon Wireless generally does try to corner the market on anti consumer behavior (crippling phones, etc), its broadband cellular data service EVDO is pretty amazing. Basically, if Verizon Wireless did not have such a broad coverage map, they probably could not do such things. Sprint is now trying to compete with 3G data rates as well. Using GPRS on my blackberry is painful, and cannot be used for anything serious. Is there any pan-European 3G GSM data service?
GSM is not all that is claimed to be - when I rented a local SIM card in NZ, I lost blackberry functionality after 7 or so days, and got conflicting answers as to whose fault it was (Vodafone NZ, T-Mobile USA, Blackberry, God, etc
ostiguy
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