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Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012
Mozilla has sent out a
press release describing its announcements at Mobile World Congress.
"In a joint press conference, Telefónica revealed their intention to
work with us to deliver the very first open Web devices in 2012. These
devices, architected entirely on the Web and built based on an HTML5 stack
with powerful Web APIs, will mean significant advances in speed and cost
reduction for mobile devices in the future. Attendees at the press
conference were able to see a sneak preview of what is possible with HTML5
open Web technologies powering entire mobile device functions and
experiences." There is also a teaser of sorts at openwebdevice.com.
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Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 27, 2012 14:30 UTC (Mon) by samth (subscriber, #1290) [Link]
There's a bunch more information in a blog post here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/mozillas-boot-to-gecko-t...
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 27, 2012 21:08 UTC (Mon) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
The Boot to Gecko presentation at FOSDEM was the best "marketing" presentation at FOSDEM this year (my completely subjective rating out of my completely unrepresentative sample of the 200+ sessions held)
I don't see a video recording, though.
I'm not a big Firefox fanboy, but Boot to Gecko might be the best that happens to the free software aware mobile phone user after the demise of Maemo.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 1:15 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
As long as the design architecture explicitly includes proprietary daemons running on the CPU (as opposed to the Baseband processor), I certainly will not be interested in this initiative. The UI and other bits might be interesting to port to FSO though.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Architecture
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 6:07 UTC (Tue) by alison (✭ supporter ✭, #63752) [Link]
It's fascinating that B2G is based on bionic rather than glibc. Note for example that the architecture includes gralloc, rild and libstagefright rather than the glibc equivalents. Thanks to Pabs for the links.
B2G using bionic instead of glibc Posted Feb 28, 2012 8:17 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]
As far as I understand, this choice is not made for legal reasons (ie. not because Mozilla want to reduce the use of (L)GPL licensed code) but for purely technical reasons. They want to convince hardware makers that the code that will be running on the devices is as close as possible to Android, so that no extra effort is required in hardware to support B2G.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 11:21 UTC (Tue) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] > the demise of Maemo Maemo isn't quite dead yet — see Nemo Mobile (and Cordia HD for the tablet UX).
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:27 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
I liked the talk by Rasterman about EFL and Tizen too:
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/EFL.webm
I don't think the Mozilla talks are on the site yet.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 12:27 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417) [Link]
"... and built based on an HTML5 stack with powerful Web APIs ..."
It would be nice if mozilla could get html5 working properly on their existing platforms: this bug has been outstanding since 2010: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612246 .
Bizarrely, only one user can play html5 audio or video on a computer using firefox until the /tmp directory is cleared out, and so on for the next user.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:43 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
If that bug is biting you and you want to work around it, take a look at pam_namespace. Polyinstantiated /tmp should make your problem go away.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417) [Link]
> Polyinstantiated /tmp should make your problem go away.
In fact, I just patched the source code (a slightly different patch than the one in that particular bug report). Not knowing the mozilla source code, it took me nearly a day to track this bug down (not having found the earlier bug report in bugzilla), and I ended up being really surprised that such a basic error, with such a trivial fix, and with user impact, could be allowed to linger so long in the code base, particularly when I later found out that there was an active bug report from 2010.
That is as it may be. For those who don't want to patch the source, I suspect it would be easier to start firefox with a shell script which sets TMPDIR.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 16:42 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
I hope you've provided your patch to Mozilla's bug tracker.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 18:04 UTC (Tue) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link] Bizarrely, only one user can play html5 audio or video on a computer using firefox until the /tmp directory is cleared out, and so on for the next user. That sounds an awful lot like my experience with a JVM running the iLO remote console (RC) from an HP DL380: The first user who starts an RC session can start an RC from another host, but no other user can start an RC until that person quits. This Fortune 100 company can't be bothered to diagnose and fix the problem, so now the "secure gateway" boxes are Windows. "Oh well," say the poor IT saps, "it's path of least resistance: The folks in charge also love Exchange, Office, SharePoint, Active Directory, etc." Golf-course-ware at its finest.
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:11 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417) [Link]
> The first user who starts an RC session can start an RC from another host,
> but no other user can start an RC until that person quits.
It's worse than that. Two different users can't use html5 audio/video with firefox (and presumably other mozilla products) consecutively, as well as concurrently, unless the temporary directory is cleaned out. This basically means that if you share your home computer with your spouse/partner, you are out of luck. (For distributions such as ubuntu which do clear out the /tmp directory on reboots, you can at least reboot if your significant other wants to use his/her user account, but that is hardly convenient.)
Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012 Posted Feb 29, 2012 7:45 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Denial of service attack FTW! I wonder if it also allows arbitrary file overwrite.
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