Earlier this week Mozilla announced a new operating system (OS) built off of their Gecko engine[...] The OS, currently codenamed Boot To Gecko or B2G, is unique in the sense that it will boot from Android drivers. [...]

Originally Posted by misterc

some even paid a small fortune to have a seat in the 1st row, i'd say

Originally Posted by misterc

that's the MeeGo thread, right?

independently of the questionable fate of B2G, it is worth noticing that it uses Android drivers.
maybe something MeeGo needs to start working on, if it wants to get any reach?
of course, defining platform standards and providing drivers for those go hand in hand...

any thoughts?

Originally Posted by danramos

Well, now, that sounds very NDIS-wrapper-ish. I wonder how do-able that would be.

Originally Posted by lma

What makes android drivers better/more open/whatever than maemo/meego ones?

Originally Posted by gerbick

Better than Maemo because they get updated? Otherwise, I'm just as curious.

Intel claims that missing the boat that sailed loaded with all-conquering mobile phones and tablets on board won't leave it scratching about with nothing to flog, as the connected world gives up on the desktop and goes handheld instead.
[...]
We haven't heard the 'Internet runs on x86' argument for a while now, but Leszinske did mutter something about the challenges developers will face knocking up apps for Windows on ARM. He also muttered something about MeeGo, but in a rather half-hearted manner: "Maybe it will be successful, maybe it won't," he said, in a manner suggesting the latter possibility is more likely. For some reason, we suddenly thought of another meaning of the past participle 'Googled.'[...]

Originally Posted by misterc

i don't get the picture... X-(


EDIT: i think they already did the NDIS-wrappish thingy, didn't they?
they are able to run Android apps on Harmattan, or did i confuse that with something else?
not sure in how far that would do for booting, however

Originally Posted by lma

What makes android drivers better/more open/whatever than maemo/meego ones?

Originally Posted by danramos

Again, no... Maemo nor MeeGo are neither able to run Android apps yet. You can boot into NITdroid to run Android apps, but you have to reboot into NITdroid. So far, near as I can tell, there's never been a released Android app engine to run under either Maemo nor MeeGo. If anybody's seen one--PLEASE let us know and provide a link or reference to it.



Better because they would at least work, work faster/better and be available... NOT more open, that's the problem with an NDIS style wrapper (or you might be familiar with the nVidia style GPL-wrapper)--you're wrapping a closed-source binary blob with an open-source "interpreter" object to speak to said driver... whatever, well.. yeah.. if your platform wants to run on ANY hardware, it might work better or at least WORK at all if you could write an NDIS-style or GPL wrapper to run hardware drivers. I'm not saying it's the best or most open way to get things done--I'm just saying it might be the only way to get direct and/or functional access to accelerated or proprietary hardware, using Android-intended hardware drivers... and it would mean you wouldn't have to disassemble or reverse engineer the drivers--just the way Android itself manages to talk to them.