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Nokia Researcher Puts Firefox OS On Raspberry Pi
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)."
Raspberry Pi, Nokia, Mozilla, Firefox all in one slashdot article - nice work.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Who cares, Raspberry Pi may as well be vapourware given that there is no supply. I'm an IT Manager who manages an entire Educational Institution (Their target market apparently) and I see a use for these devices in our environment but I can't even one lousy unit for testing! I've been waiting months. We should coin a new phrase, Trickleware, because it trickles down the supply chain like piss called rain down a leg.
Is this an attempt by Microsoft to fragment the Raspberry Pi platform?
FirefoxOS is like running the Fennec browser, except without all the bloat of Java for the UI.
The mobile browsers work OK in that much memory. My ipad1 can browse fairly well and "only" has 256mb of ram.
Nokia is an empty shell, zombie puppet company controlled by Microsoft. They have been running into the ground for some time now. They have no future. They are an asset being spent to push Microsoft agenda.
Better than the phones they been making the past few years.
You might want to check out the VIA pico-ITX ARM board.
So it's immediately less valuable as a community project and provides less benefits to those who own it, because you personally can't get your hands on one, because you missed the order window for the first batch of 10,000 and are too cheap to buy one of the thousands being listed on eBay?
Sorry, I must have missed the Slashdot community vote where you were appointed the center of attention for the entire fucking universe.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Rather than add more memory, why not use the architecture of the Pi to write a new browser that doesn't suffer from software bloat and scope creep? The RPi project was initially targeted at teaching children how to write programs that run on small, simple, and affordable systems with no fancy toolkits or bloated libraries.
In other words, the way it used to be, when 256MB was a blessing and not a hindrance.
What's wrong with Slashdot in Elinks? I browse this site and many others in Elinks everyday (right now actually) and haven't had any problems at all. Maybe it's because I'm on the old comment system.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Maybe troll Slashdot with your user account instead of as an AC behind some jinky proxy and you won't have that problem next time. Just a thought.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Nokia started out 1869, over the years they have changed fields and branched out quite a lot. What we are talking about here is the consumer phone part of Nokia. I doubt that Microsoft have any say in anything that Nokia Siemens Networks does or for that anything related to any other part of Nokia.
Is Nokia stupid or just trying to run the company in to the ground? They're seriously attempting to go with a new platform, not a well established OS like Android?
Is Nokia stupid or just trying to run the company in to the ground? They're seriously attempting to go with a new platform, not a well established OS like Symbian?
Would that have been your quote a few years ago if Nokia announced they researching to use Android on their new product?
Idiot, these projects are called research for a reason. They try stuff and see what work best. Fuck off.
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 you to scroll left and right to read long ones. Finally, while I'm ranting, the options screens are completely unintuitive, which the little question mark link for help just restating the name of the option - not very helpful. Isn't there someone involved with Slashdot who can turn the mobile (view of this) site into something to be proud of? Failing that, just do a native Android app and be done with it.
It's not the programming that prevents people from creating their own light-weight browser. It is the horrifying pile of "standards" that one has to implement to view websites correctly in the browser that scares them away (Although a browser that could only XHTML would be nice).
Shhh, you'll shatter his simplistic worldview.
The Pi is 700Mhz ARM processor with 256MB total memory (some reserved for GPU) and some hardware for OpenGL and MP4. The more you can push onto the GPU the better because the CPU is designed to power set top boxes and the like where the CPU should marshal the hardware and do as little as possible otherwise. So Raspbmc works okay for the most part because mp4 content is being powered by the hardware and there is only one main process running. But Raspbian demonstrates that a desktop performance is awful even with the lightest of configurations. I don't expect the performance of Firefox OS to be earthshattering. Even budget phones would have a faster CPU and more RAM than the Pi. It might run and be interesting for that, but I think performance will be poor especially on heavy content. So calling the Pi "capable" is reaching a bit.
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.
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.
I have a RPi, but the current hardware version has some major issues.
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 every so often. The installed fuses only allow ~100mA power, USB 2.0 spec is 500mA. The capacitor installed on the USB power lines is only 47uF, the spec calls for a minimum of 130uF per power line (this makes hot swapping impossible, basically the device freezes if you plug in something while running.) To fix these issues, I added a wire to bypass the fuses and also soldered on some capacitors to fix the hot plug issues. However there still seems to be a driver problem, as my keyboard repeats characters.
Overheating - Mine overheats, even unboxed. It could be that I have a faulty unit. When it overheats, the ethernet stops working. I glued on some heatsinks to get around this.
Maybe the expectations were too high. Maybe this device should be advertised as command line only.
I wish the designers of the RPi would officially admit to the hardware issues, and stop manufacturing the current revision.
Hmm, what about trying to build Escort (http://code.google.com/p/es-operating-system/wiki/UsingEscort) for the Raspberry Pi?
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.
I ordered a Pi from Newark/element14 (a Farnell company) about 1.5 months ago and it finally got delivered yesterday. I would check them out if you are still looking for one. I am located in US, so I'm not sure if that will make a difference or not but I believe they ship internationally as well.
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...
"...as soon as Stephen Elop found out the researcher was thrown out of a window while Elop threw a chair and yelled "You don't disrespect Windows Phone like that!"."
Finally a professional PCB layout having external connectors on one side of the board.
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.
Yep. To create and maintain a web browser that is capable of rendering the current-day web, you need an army of developers.
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.
Do not confuse geeks with website designers. It's just the same as assuming that since you can program, you can design a UI. Different skillsets, different specialities. Sure people think it's possible to do the other job, but the end result is usually quite nasty.
And the reason Slashdot doesn't handle unicode is simple - it actually does, but it does it on a whitelist basis rather than a blacklist. There was a spurt of trolls sticking right-to-left override characters in their comments resulting in unreadable pages. So /. basically whitelists a few characters (since a lot of the valid codepoints aren't defined yet and may include even more control codes).
Though it is fun from time to time sticking right-to-left override in a comment system to see if they blindly handle unicode...
From my experience, no site render well on mobile browsers except if there is a website's version written for mobile devices. Something few are paying attention to.
Achille Talon
Hop!
They are now for general sale. There seems to even be bundles coming complete with keyboard and SD card with a preinstalled Linux distro.
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, shortened, etc.) to include the new text. That's all done client-side.
AJAX makes for snazzy pages by increasing the complexity all around. On a home machine, you can afford the slight (or sometimes not-so-slight) resource hit. On an embedded system, which the Raspberry Pi most resembles, you cannot.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Not sure why it is taking you so long. I ordered two from element14, took two days and three days respectively.
And you forgot that it's not even available on IPv6
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.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Chris Weber, the CEO and former Microsoft executive, fired Oleg Romashin stating that "Resistance to our Win7 strategy is futile. You will be eliminated."
I recall the old days of EMS where a piece of software would double your memory by compressing/decompressing on the fly, whatever happened to those?
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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 transactions. Since Linux is not a realtime O/S, those transactions can fail depending on random Linux scheduling, and so the Raspberry Pi's USB system is plagued with intermittent USB data loss.
C. Tracking fault:
- The USB hub/Ethernet controller device (LAN9512) is incorrectly connected on the board, sharing its personal 1.8V regulator with the rest of the Raspberry Pi board. This is out of spec and seems to be responsible for the excessively high temperature of the USB chip, and may contribute to the USB problems.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation's forum and the Raspberry Pi technical discussions group at Element 14 have many threads devoted to these issues.
I timed the slashdot homepage on an ipad1: 1.5s for something to appear, 5s for the whole thing to finish. Seems fine to me. The BBC homepage takes less than 3s and appears fully-functional.
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?
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".
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Limits are always bring interesting things come out.
Like, twitter with 140 char limit.
So shell out the extra $37 and get one of these instead. I don't understand the draw to Raspberry Pi. It's severely underpowered for doing anything, even at $35. I don't even count the $25 version as an option because it doesn't have ethernet (or any form of networking), rendering it utterly worthless.
Specs rundown between the two:
Raspberry Pi version "B"
ARM11 CPU @ 700MHz
256MB RAM
VideoCore IV GPU
USB 2.0 port x 2
SD card slot
Ethernet
$35 USD
Mini MK802
ARM Cortex-A8 CPU @ 1.5GHz
1GB RAM
Mali 400 GPU
USB 2.0 OTG port x 2 (one standard and one mini)
microSD slot
Wifi 802.11b/g/n
$72 USD
Are you talking about something like RAM Doubler for classic Mac OS or zRam for Linux?