openAOS

I’ve been working on this project on the side for a few weeks, but I’ve actually been eyeing it far longer. I’ve been affiliated to the Mozilla project for a few years and I’ve even been hoping to get something gecko based working on my PMA back then, but it just was not possible.

Now with openAOS running Ångström it was quite easy. I took an older BitBake recipe first devised by Koen and adapted it until it would build the source now known as Firefox Mobile 1.1 beta 1.

At first I was missing a patch and things were quite slow. But then I fixed a few things:

• Reworked against current source a native-bpp patch
• Installed the quick-fix tslib driver (as known from gen6) to calm down the touch screen
• Fixed the keymap like on gen6 to have a lower repeat rate

Now Fennec (the code name for the Firefox Mobile project) is running a lot more smooth. Its still not a 100% match to the Android browser but quite close. But it sure beats it by giving me access to such cool AddOns like AdBlock Plus!

Side-notes: It does also run on gen6, but it comes currently with a huge caveat. It will run out of memory and crash easily. If you run an kernel that does not reserve RAM for AVOS then it runs quite fine as it then has 30M to fill.

I did – out of sheer curiosity – try to make the flash plugins shipped with the original Archos firmwares work, but failed. They are compiled against µclibc, we run glibc, some libraries have conflicting versions, unresolved symbols are the result.

Another nice thing is that Ångström is pretty simmilar to Maemo, so we get the regular 1.1 beta1 quality (plus the odd bugs that always creep in) and don’t have to run around with an “pre alpha” label like the Android version.   – Please note though even only very small bits of the source have been changed that this is not an official Mozilla build.

The updated recipes will surface soon in our svn. In addition I’m going to push this updated recipe to Koen for general inclusion in Ångström.

Oh and the installation packages can be had here:

https://openaos.org/tmp/fennec/

As this is only an temporary preview this link will die sooner or later as the package will either be pre-installed on our Images or will be available from an package feed.

NOTE for gen7: Please note that you won’t get network access if you don’t run it as root or add your user to the group 3003 (cf issue #59)

Tags: Ångström, archos5, archos5it, archos7, gen6, gen7, gpl, sde, sources

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