My Watch Runs GNU/Linux

https://learntemail.sam.today/blog/my-watch-runs-gnu-linux-and-it-is-amazing/

by BuuQu9hu • 10 years ago

437 234 10 years ago

learntemail.sam.today

orblivion• 10 years ago

I run Asteroid OS on the old LG watch (which I also got for free; probably a prime market for this OS). It's still in alpha so it's fairly buggy. But it looks really nice, particularly for being FOSS. It can (in principle) do notifications, weather, and music control. I look forward to them smoothing it all over, but I wear it already.

h4nkoslo• 10 years ago

This would be extremely appealing if it had sufficient I/O to make it into a mobile, basically headless computer you could hook up to whatever display or input was handy. Looks like it only has a single MicroUSB port though.

sigmar• 10 years ago

You could do microUSB -> MHL -> HDMI, and maybe use the watch bluetooth for mouse/keyboard input.

Though I don't think MHL is open source, and I'm probably completely wrong in thinking the BT hardware on that could be used with the bluetooth host stack

detaro2• 10 years ago

MHL is not based on USB, only runs over the same cabling, so that wouldn't work (unless for some totally crazy reason the watch has the necessary hardware, totally unused)

i336_20• 10 years ago

Theoretically, it has the CPU, and the USB port is 2.0, so you could manage a USB 2.0->VGA converter.

I've heard such converters are the hardware equivalent of running the unaccelerated VESA driver due to the low bandwidth though. I don't expect it would do 60fps beyond 1152x864 and 30fps beyond 1280x1024.

mschuster91• 10 years ago

Speaking from experience: these things are only useful for running powerpoint presentations. They break down even on scrolling a browser page, much less playing video.

api_or_ipa• 10 years ago

One of the big draws of buying and wearing a mechanical watch is the emotional feeling of something busily working away on your wrist. In the same way I would fine great joy in wearing a flavour of linux right on my wrist.

kbutler• 10 years ago

Meh... Maybe I'm just jaded by having had Linux running in my pocket for many years. (Linux, then BSD, then Linux again...)

MBCook• 10 years ago

I do love my Apple Watch, but I would also be thrilled if they put some sort of really fancy mechanical gizmo in there for the sole of having some ultra complex mechanical escapement only instead of software.

disordinary4• 10 years ago

Apple used to put speakers in their ipods just so there was a click when you used the scroll wheel, so I wouldn't put it past them to have some sort of haptic imitation of ticking that 99.999% of people will never notice or feel. :)

OJFord3• 10 years ago

Absolutely - I'd love to see more along the lines of Tag Heuer's 'Connected' watches (which I think all have LCD faces), but stepping back to mechanical time.

At it's most basic, just a notification light that mirrors that on my phone/tablet.

Ideally, I think a ticker-tape-style circular display around the edge of the (real mechanical) watch face to give notification headings would be awesome.

ajford2• 10 years ago

Check out the Withings Steel HR. No ticker tap display, but it does have a small inset LCD to give you connectivity, but with style/class of analog.

https://www.withings.com/eu/en/products/steel-hr

wonko1• 10 years ago

Oh neat! I've always wanted this.

When I last tried hacking my Moto360 it was possible to get Debian running in a chroot reasonability easily.

The trouble came mostly with video access. The userland graphics libs are all compiled against BIONIC rather than glibc. And they were at the time only available in compiled form. That meant it wasn't really possible to have a clean glibc system.

I guess either something has changed, or they're using a hack, incorporating BIONIC, which is what many people have done on other mobile platforms.

Very neat though, I'm going to have to try this out!

voltagex_• 10 years ago

Apparently libhybris [1] solves the glibc -> bionic problem, but I've never been able to work out how to use it. I'd like to see a "Hello World" done with a small rootfs+libhybris on something like the Nexus 4.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software)

shmerl3• 10 years ago

What GPU does it use? Is it a native GPU driver + Mesa or you use it with libhybris and Android blobs? Wayland is neat, but it's pretty annoying when there are no native drivers available. One of the problems with Android is, that it became like Windows of the past. Hardware makers produce Android drivers with closed userspace blobs, and leave it at that. Blobs built against bionic make running a proper glibc Linux on such devices a pain unless hacks like libhybris are deployed, or you manage to replace them with proper open drivers.

fabrice_d• 10 years ago

From the front page:

"AsteroidOS is built upon a rock-solid base system. Qt 5.6 and QML are used for fast and easy app development. OpenEmbedded provides a full GNU/Linux distribution and libhybris allows easy porting to most Android and Android Wear watches."

shmerl3• 10 years ago

Understandably it can use libhybris. I was asking what GPU is used in the poster's watch. If it has native drivers, libhybris isn't necessary.

hardwaresofton2• 10 years ago

This is awesome. I got in on the smartwatch craze super early (like sony smartwatch 1), and the one thing I wished was for was some F/OSS to run on my watch (believe it or not sony smartwatch 1 actually had a dev kit), and to finally getting rid of the oddly-intrusive smartphone apps that came with most smartwatches. Hyped to hear someone actually did it with Asteroid OS (even if it's Alpha).

I also thought FirefoxOS would evolve to maybe get in this space, but I was mega wrong about that and lots of other things so there's that. I'm excited that Asteroid won't meet the same fate, but maybe I'm biased.

Also stumbled upon http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Main_Page while looking the repo for Asteriod. Excited to see what comes of this project and maybe even contribute in the future.

xyzzy_plugh• 10 years ago

OE has been around a while, and while it has matured well it is still somewhat of a bridge to building bespoke distributions. It's a great start if you're looking to maintain a custom distribution for a custom product/form factor but it's a bit rough for end users. Worse still, there is little-to-no motivation for vendors to open up their products to their customers.

hardwaresofton2• 10 years ago

I've always thought that one of the best things about the Raspberry Pi/ODROID/Zero/Arduino/other mini computers/microcontrollers is that they made it obvious and easy (easier at least) for people to bring hardware to consumers, at the sacrifice of some speed and efficiency.

When the Raspberry Pi came out and only cost $25, it made me think I could write some relatively resilient/robust software, put it on a SD card, put it in a PI, add a case, and sell useful hardware for $50. OE seems like a good step in the direction of recovering some of the speed/efficiency losses that running even some of the most lightweight linux distros would force you into.

I think the end user problem can be solved with extremely robust client-side installers and amazing instructions. If IKEA can get people to build furniture (even if badly), why can't we manage to get a user who has booted an operating system on a running computer to flash a device, when usually most cases are the default case (as in you usually don't have to change a ton of ADB/system settings to connect to most android devices).

joatmon-snoo• 10 years ago

OE is very much a thing in embedded Linux. You might also want to look up the Yocto Project.

I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.

It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.

aceperry3• 10 years ago

Part of the problem is due to the small community of developers involved. There are a lot of ways to package and build your source tree, especially if you draw from a lot of different projects. See the chromium or android projects to see what I mean. If you compare the smaller and older embedded projects to the Arduino community, it's like day and night. The Arduino project has a much larger community of users and contributors which has given it much better libraries, tools, and support.

branchless2• 10 years ago

This needs a microphone. Would be great to be able to drive activity via voice, or make reminders. If it had some kind of bluetooth/wifi also then you could send emails via dictation but I guess the size/battery constraints rule that out.

andrewaylett• 10 years ago

It's got a microphone. Also both Bluetooth and WiFi, and you can (with the original Android Wear -- no idea if Asteroid has got to the point of implementing anything similar) drive activities by voice, set reminders and send emails by dictation.

The battery lasts for around two days.

branchless2• 10 years ago

Wow that's cool. Battery life is always a pain but two days is not so bad.

flukus2• 10 years ago

Quad core + 512MB of RAM. Now it just needs HDMI out and we've got a quite capable portable computer on our wrists.

BuffaloBagel• 10 years ago

throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato... baby, you've got a stew going

gravypod• 10 years ago

My only concern with smart watches is battery life.

soylentcola• 10 years ago

It's definitely one of the main restricting factors. That said, even my gen-one Moto 360, while not new and not known for being amazing in the battery department hasn't been an issue for me. I just put it on the cradle on my nightstand when I go to bed and pick it up in the morning. It charges pretty quickly as well so if I get home from work on a Friday and anticipate being out late, I can put it on the cradle for 30-60 min and top off the charge before heading out and there's never an issue.

Still, the battery isn't something like the battery in a traditional watch so at some point I won't just be able to order a button cell on Amazon and swap it out like I could on any old Timex, etc. Definitely hurts the lifespan and it's a major reason I only bought this watch because I got it on sale for $100. I wouldn't feel as comfortable buying a $500 watch that would be forever battery-dead in 3-4 years.

awinter-py• 10 years ago

I tried asteroid on the sony smartwatch 3 this month -- graphics are iffy. Docs suggest experience is better on other hardware.

pkaye• 10 years ago

Its hard for me to consider a smartwatch when my current watch is solar powered and I haven't had to change batteries for the last 8 years. Maybe when these can run on a charge for 2+ weeks at a time I might consider it.

adamweld• 10 years ago

RIP pebble.

aedron• 10 years ago

My Seiko Kinetic is going on 15 years without a single charge and will probably do fine for many years to come. Also, I can just look at it to tell the time, no need to turn it on first!

disordinary4• 10 years ago

I found an old Casio in a box a few years back, it must have been five or six years old but was still going strong and had the right time.

fegu2• 10 years ago

My huaweii smartwatch is always on. That, and being round instead of square, is the reason I bought it.

suprfnk• 10 years ago

That's a completely different usecase though. You don't wear a smartwatch just to see the time. You wear it because it can do stuff for you outside of telling you the time.

darfs• 10 years ago

Im confused. Isnt that the definition of a Smartphone? :P

fegu2• 10 years ago

The ability to tell time is enough alone. The varied selection of clockfaces to match my mood or clothing makes me prefer my huaweii smartwatch over a mechanical one. I don't use any special features.

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

On my case, I already went through the first smartwatch wave in the 80's, so I don't see any value on the current one.

I see it as a way for mobile OES to sell more electronics, now that everyone and their dog owns a mobile phone and a tablet, and don't plan to buy news ones anytime soon.

RhodaLs• 10 years ago

Being an old Slashdot user, the first incredibly dumb thought of mine was "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" With a pic of Natalie Portman for the watch face, of course.

But, one fun thing I could imagine doing is using it as an incredibly portable PirateBox. Or any other use of a file server hiding in plain sight.

AceJohnny2• 10 years ago

Man, I remember when those jokes were old, 15 years ago.

Speaking of Beowulf, has there ever been an evolution of the concept? The closest I've seen since has been QNX's QNet, which allows transparent management and communication between process on nodes of the cluster. I suppose Hadoop or even Kubernetes can be seen as the continuation of the concept?

erik• 10 years ago

The idea of a Beowulf cluster was using networked commodity PC hardware and Linux to do HPC / scientific computing.

In some ways this idea came to dominate. If you look at the top500 list:

https://www.top500.org/list/2016/11/

All of these machines are big clusters running Linux. Mostly on Intel CPUs.

But on the other hand, the idea of using commodity hardware is kind of a thing of the past. It's mostly Xeon CPUs, not desktop processors. And it's specialized network hardware. And more and more you see dedicated compute hardware like Intel Phi and Nvidia Tesla cards.

homarp2• 10 years ago

I guess the current "beowulf" pocket cluster are 4 GPU cards to crack passwords

https://twitter.com/hashcat/status/817367152927866880

and now to do machine learning...

cr0sh• 10 years ago

Speaking of Beowulf, has there ever been an evolution of the concept?

I don't know if you'd call it an "evolution of the concept", but there are people who've made "low cost" clusters of Raspberry Pi boards (anywhere from four, to several hundred), not so much for practical purposes, but more for learning how to set up, use, and maintain such a system, without needing the space or power requirements a real system would need.

Angostura• 10 years ago

In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman clusters you!

ge962• 10 years ago

Site has responsive problem, cells overflow on Nexus 4

samtoday2• 10 years ago

Love the nexus 4 mate! Watch out for breaking power buttons though!

Thanks for the bug report btw. I'll fix it when I'm thinking straight in the morning!

ge962• 10 years ago

Oh yeah. It's those pesky little things that push the width beyond 100% at least here it was easy to find. Sometimes you have to use the console>inspect that highlights parts of the page to find what is causing the width overflow.

Also yeah Nexus 4 isn't bad, too bad they don't update it anymore :(

rxlim• 10 years ago

I like how he is sarcastic about being very happy that systemd is installed on the watch.

i336_20• 10 years ago

If you're right, that's a big sigh of relief from me.

The guy mentions how "Lennart Poettering would love it!" as the h2, and also describes X11 as "legacy".

With these in mind I feared he was serious about the systemd bit.

I'm really sad X11 is legacy software myself, as an aside. It's a disaster, sure, but now we have one more layer of "uhhhh..." for all the UX-types to get scared away by: it used to be "(WinAPI) vs ((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))", which was embarrassing enough; now it's "(WinAPI) vs (X11((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))/Wayland((Qt)/(GTK+)/(???)))" which is just plain annoying for low-level graphics hacker wannabes - I can make a WinAPI app in C that opens a window in a few KB, where as to do that in Linux now I HAVE to support XCB and also write my own tiny UI for Wayland.

Practically speaking it means that most developers will just pick a side^H^H^H^Htoolkit and go with that. It doesn't help that I've never been able to get past Qt's love of background processes vs. GTK's various displays of autism/spasticness.

sighs...rant over, situation accepted a bit more.

systemd is still a disaster though. I saw a massive 3Wx5H 1080p video wall in a shop window the other day, displaying... systemd emergency mode.

At least I learned that some video stretchers are smart and will drop the panels they're controlling into standby if they display black for too long. (Only the two panels at the top-left displaying the error were on, the others visibly had their backlights off. Neat.)

i336_20• 10 years ago

Curious why this was downvoted (it's currently at -1). Happy to hear any explanation or view.

flukus2• 10 years ago

It hasn't been all roses in the windows world. Aside from qt/gtk being just as desirable there, there was also winforms and WPF in .net that are now left out in the cold and no clear forward direction that would also work on windows 7. They seem to be taking an each way bet on whether Win32 is deprecated or not.

Actually, I think this is the situation that lead to the growth in webapps and probably helped the decline (or failure to rise) of windows phone, no one had a clue where MS was going.

ensiferum3• 10 years ago

Bollocks, the equivalent of opening a window using Win32 in Linux world is using X11's xlib (or xcb) API. Equivalent albeit more brain damaged.

Wayland doesn't change this. Once Wayland is adopted the X server will become a Wayland client and X client's will connect to the X server as usual. You don't have to write a native Wayland application if you don't want to.

wott• 10 years ago

I'm really sad X11 is legacy software myself, as an aside. It's a disaster, sure, but now we have one more layer of "uhhhh..." for all the UX-types to get scared away by: it used to be "(WinAPI) vs ((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))", which was embarrassing enough; now it's "(WinAPI) vs (X11((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))/Wayland((Qt)/(GTK+)/(???)))" which is just plain annoying for low-level graphics hacker wannabes - I can make a WinAPI app in C that opens a window in a few KB, where as to do that in Linux now I HAVE to support XCB and also write my own tiny UI for Wayland.

That's worse than this: you will quite possibly need features that are not implemented through Wayland, but through each different Desktop Environment, through different APIs, since Wayland ditched many X11(+standardised extensions) features.

jdub• 10 years ago

He's not. Far better to run a tightly configured systemd on an embedded device than thickets of shell scripts. And as he states, it makes modifying device behaviour that much simpler.

digi_owl6• 10 years ago

I am honestly not sure...

hyperpallium• 10 years ago

This is amazing (I also have a moment of amazement at my smartphone every so often).

But an issue is power usage. (eg) ubuntu runs on a smartphone, but with much shorter battery life than android. (Tho TBF, I don't know the power efficiency of Asteroid OS).

One side-benefit of non-rooting linux (eg termux, terminalIDE) is retaining battery life.

However, Asteroid OS is open source, which counts for a lot!

matthewmorgan• 10 years ago

Looks cool. Wouldn't trust it to tell the time though

72deluxe3• 10 years ago

Does it just run date on the CLI and pipe that out? That'd be useful. Or show the date in your BASH prompt.

icebraining• 10 years ago

    watch date

disordinary4• 10 years ago

Whats the battery life like running Asteroid vs Android Wear?

mankash666• 10 years ago

Newbie question - isn't Android wear's kernel open source? Android has switched to Wayland as well right?

guelo• 10 years ago

Android Wear's kernel is linux and some of the low level userland is open source but everything above that is locked down and proprietary. It's definitely not using Wayland. In general Google has been moving away from Android's open source legacy as much as they can.

fsiefken• 10 years ago

Tizen uses Wayland

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

No, it is using Flinger.

https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/architecture.htm...

Animats• 10 years ago

Four processors in a watch? That's impressive, but if you actually use them, what's the battery life?

dspillett• 10 years ago

Four processors in a watch?

Four cores, which makes a difference.

what's the battery life?

It might not be as bad as could be feared, specifically regarding the CPU at idle anyway. A lot of modern CPUs support turning cores individually on/off (or at least into very low power sleep states) as needed and if the OS scheduler is bright enough then taking advantage of this can be a lot more power efficient than trying to fiddle around with variable clock rates. There might be a performance hit for single one-thread tasks of course as per-core performance might be low, but at times when you care (while in active use, interacting with an app) there will be at least three distinct tasks going on: core function management, display management, and at least one user task. While the watch is idle there will just be one active task most of the time so only one core needs to be powered up (of none most of the time, with device management tasks and user apps that respond to events/notifications only waking up on interrupt).

Having said that, having to charge it at least once most days is my only major complaint with the MS Band that I wear most of the time. It would be interesting to see how well this manages in that regard.

kriro• 10 years ago

Since I own the same watch...I'm intrigued. Battery life is a concern (as is integration with some stuff). But yeah who am I kidding I'll try this and even if all it will ever do is display the time there's something to be said about "well yeah I got my Linux box right here!" :D

Remembering the "runs on a toaster" shirts I am now curious if NetBSD (or any BSD) will run on it. The thought that I never even considered messing with the watch makes me a bit sad (I've turned into too much of a consumer, not enough tinkerer left :P)

Nux• 10 years ago

Very high CPU usage while browsing this site, Firefox' Reader View saves the say once again..

cornedor• 10 years ago

I had the same problem here, while scrolling Firefox couldn't catch up and showed white just white for a short time. Then I saw the huge background gradient. The background is an image, a radial gradient, and also background-blend-mode: hue;

edit: there are even more huge div's that have the same background, so there are multiple layers of gradients with hue blend mode.

samtoday2• 10 years ago

Spot on. I found this out the hard way today and wrote up a post with some benchmarks and the tiny patch that fixed the bug: https://learntemail.sam.today/blog/1-css-property-that-will-...

vmp• 10 years ago

Does it run Doom? :-)

coldtea4• 10 years ago

Obviously it does.

dom962• 10 years ago

is there anything like this for Pebbles?

INTPenis• 10 years ago

Love the hack but I can't agree that they're a fad. Long before smartwatches my cousin had a bluetooth watch connected to his phone. And today I have a smartwatch connected to my phone to avoid having to stop and take it out when I'm on a bike. I bike everywhere, like thousands others where I live.

So there's clearly a market for some sort of wrist-device that makes using your phone easier.

The thing that makes it feel like a stupid fad is when you have to charge it every day and therefore forget to put it on. It hasn't become habitual quite yet.

Which is why I love my smartwatch for having an e-ink display and not an amoled display. So even after more than a year of operation I still only charge it once a week.

andrepd• 10 years ago

That's why he said it was a fad for him. And it is, for the vast majority of people, just a fad. Bar some use cases like biking and so on, having a smartwatch brings nuisances for no tangible benefits.

coldtea4• 10 years ago

One could argue that in the larger context of modern cities (outside of specific places like the Netherlands, or some Chinese cities), biking is mostly a fad too.

jpl56• 10 years ago

I notice that nobody answers to the "what is the battery life" questions...

delinka• 10 years ago

The article has both the hard fact "410 mAh" as well a a more colloquial "a good days worth!"

Sure, the author doesn't confirm this nor expand on it, but I'd say his comment is sufficient.

itp• 10 years ago

410 mAh is a measure of battery capacity, not battery life. And the phrase "a good days worth" presumably describes the watch as shipped with Android wear.

I think what the original question was getting at was more like "what is the battery life of the watch when running AsteroidOS?" That seems like a pretty fair question which was not addressed.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

What would be the killer app for a smartwatch from a hacker/techie perspective? Because I'm still struggling to see any realistic use case for myself.

OJFord3• 10 years ago

In a movie, we'd be disabling CCTV cameras from it as we ran through corridors of the Pentagon, y'know, hacking stuff.

In reality, I think the author just did it for its own sake:

I ended up with a free LG Watch Urbane ... I realized that smartwatches were just a fad (for me at least), and this was a device I could experiment with.

veli_joza• 10 years ago

For me, killer application is basic usable text input. I'd love to covertly send text messages, write down some thoughts and TODO items, while still maintaining eye contact and following discussion.

For it to be usable, it should not require sight and higher typing speeds should be achievable by training. This rules out virtual querty keyboards and predictive suggestions. I think glyph recognition would be usable, but also other gesture systems would work if they don't demand supervision by sight.

jokr0042• 10 years ago

Does there exist any input method that doesn't require sight other than physical keys? If so, I'm not aware of any.

mxuribe• 10 years ago

My first goal would be to set up a working jasper [https://jasperproject.github.io/] or "jarvis" type of voice-controlled system. Admittedly, there aren't that many use-cases, more of a "cool to implement" sort of thing. But it would be cool to speak voice commands into my smart watch.

ajford2• 10 years ago

My two killer "apps" are a google authenticator like app (OATH OTP token generator) and notifications.

Being able to glance at my wrist and see if I need to get my phone out is pretty nice. I don't try to be inconspicuous in meetings or anything, but when I'm doing something, or walking down the street, etc., it's nice to be able to decide if I need to stop and handle it (like a call from my wife or the daycare), or can ignore it, like an email from a newsletter.

And with 2FA everywhere, it's nice to have a standalone token generator that I can wear. The one on my pebble is strictly offline operation (doesn't need the phone connected), which means it's even useful if I break/loose my phone or the battery's dead or something.

Music control is pretty cool as well. But mostly for things like when I'm doing the dishes, swimming in the pool/at the beach, or in the shower. My Pebble is fully waterproof, so I only take it off to charge every few days. So I can stream music from my phone to a bluetooth speaker, and control it without needing to handle my phone.

driverdan• 10 years ago

For me it's notifications. Calendar alerts, texts, app notifications, and alarms are much easier and less disruptive to look at on your wrist than to pull out your phone. It's a much better experience.

fit2rule• 10 years ago

For me: email. This is the one thing that, if I could do it properly on my watch, I'd get one.

gcb06• 10 years ago

meanwhile, everyone's phone here runs gnu/linux but completely out of reach.

everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode. how does your 90s self feel about that?

blauditore• 10 years ago

To be fair, that's all most users need, and could also use for desktop OS'. You don't need admin rights to open Facebook in a browser...

But it hurts as a power user.

AsyncAwait8• 10 years ago

True, but Termux[1] on android makes this less of a pain.

1 - https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=termux&fdid=...

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

I wonder if it still would work in Android 7, with the new restrictions that kill any application that tries to link to non public NDK libraries.

AlexeyBrin• 10 years ago

meanwhile, everyone's phone here runs gnu/linux but completely out of reach. everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode.

Pretty sure there is no GNU component in iOS which is based on BSD. Also, Android uses only the Linux kernel, not even close to a GNU/Linux system.

jokr0042• 10 years ago

I feel like probably half the people who insist on calling it "GNU/Linux" don't even really understand why.

jhbadger• 10 years ago

If you install Termux on android, you get a full Linux experience though, with bash, gcc, and even things like emacs, ruby, and python. And it's just a normal app -- not requiring root or anything.

e12e• 10 years ago

But that Linux kernel is usually compiled using gcc, still?

I remember there were some effort to port to first intel's compiler, then clang - but AFAIK the official stance of upstream Linux is "we use GCC, get over it"?

gcb06• 10 years ago

i confess i typed "gnu" mostly out of habit this time. But I still think gnu/linux makes sense as linux relies(ed) heavily on gcc. But you are right anyway. Should have said Linux only there.

And yes, IOS is BSD. you are right again.

But in the end, your reply is completely off-topic and misses the core issue of my comment :)

eddieroger• 10 years ago

I spend a good part of my day in one variant of a gnu/linux environment, whether it be development of apps (for which I use GNU/Emacs), or on a server administering stuff (which technically isn't gnu/linux), so having my fashion phone in kiosk mode feels pretty good, actually. I think I'd be pretty unhappy if the stuff I count as "work" in my mind bled over in to my personal life, and I love not having to jump through the same types of hoops I do for work just to make a simple phone call or send a text message.

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

My 90's self feels quite good knowing there are enough computers to hack among the big ones (and card sized, and the one on my TV (yes, with GNU/Linux), and the ones I rent...).

It would be great if my phone was completely under my control. But my priorities are getting my communication protocols back, and avoiding losing my desktops and servers. The phone can wait.

davexunit• 10 years ago

Unfortunately there is no GNU on iOS or Android. Every open a terminal on an Android phone and wonder why things just don't feel like the GNU/Linux systems you're used to? It's because it uses things like busybox instead of the GNU coreutils.

pekk• 10 years ago

Not to mention what happens if you decide you would like to start writing a little program (as one does on a real Unix system) and realize that you are in a sandbox designed to prevent you from doing that unless you use all the official SDK stuff through Dalvik, which has a completely different flavor and set of capabilities.

Sure, I have a very awesome computer that cost hundreds of dollars but I can't really use it because... somebody said so?

mastax• 10 years ago

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux

Zsh, bash, make, clang, SSH, Python, vim...

Their package selection is small compared to debian, but still quite nice.

gurkendoktor• 10 years ago

My 90s self had a Super Nintendo for which the SDK was out of reach. Now I can write apps for my iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

My desktop machine is still a desktop machine.

gcb06• 10 years ago

Sorry to hear about your nintendo limiting your childhood.

I did have a Master System, but still, I mostly played with my father's MSX and XT computers. Which had better games anyuway, and where i learned to edit hex values and cheat on my save games and later on to write simple qbasic games.

gtk40• 10 years ago

What phones run GNU/Linux? Most run Android (Linux kernel, but no GNU in sight) or iOS (based on BSD, maybe with GNU?).

JunkDNA• 10 years ago

Feels great because my 90's self can look into the future of the early 2000's and see what Windows was like when malware first erupted on the scene and ordinary people were totally unprepared to handle it. I am happy to trade my freedom to tinker for that to not be a problem so I can do actual things I need to with my phone.

zdkl2• 10 years ago

Kind of a weird argument. Has malware prevalence really fallen so much? It feels like someone's going to start selling AV software for browsers soon.

nix0n• 10 years ago

My 90s self never wanted a PC in his pocket, he wished his iPod and flip phone could be one device.

mhurron• 10 years ago

Exactly. I didn't buy a pocket computer, I bought a phone that can play music files and show a map. When I wanted a general purpose computer, I bought a general purpose computer.

jsz0• 10 years ago

everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode.

This type of attitude just discourages people from ever wanting to leave the so-called kiosk mode.

redblacktree2• 10 years ago

how does your 90s self feel about that?

It's a knife to the heart when you put it that way.

gcb06• 10 years ago

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

My phones run Java/Linux and Windows Phone.

The Linux fork used on Android and the set of official NDK APIs, make it so that Google can at any Android release change the kernel for something else and only OEMs or devs using forbidden APIs will notice.

jff• 10 years ago

Even more amazingly, running on that tiny package of hardware is some live multitasking

Yep, pretty amazing that a quad-core 1.2GHz machine with half a gig of RAM can run more than one thing at a time!

htor• 10 years ago

I sense dark sarcasm hidden in this message, perhaps from behind a smug UNIX beard?

andybak2• 10 years ago

Or maybe someone that remembers the Amiga...

globuous• 10 years ago

While I don't find this that impressive. I do find amazing that a quad-core 1.2GHz machine with half a gig of RAM can fit in that tiny package of hardware.

teaearlgraycold• 10 years ago

Is it 2003 again? The content container here uses a white png as a background instead of background-color: white

manarth2• 10 years ago

It's not a perfect white: it's a 476-pixel square with some random (very small) splotches of light grey. As the image is called 'texturetastic-white.png', I assume the intention is to give a more natural texture feel to the background.

I'll admit that it's not the design choice I would have made, but then again, I'm not a designer!

norswap• 10 years ago

Is this really something to be happy about?

Even ignoring technical considerations (the dizzying amount of code and cruft required to run a watch), it goes against one time-honored watch tradition: simple, elegant mechanics.

andybak2• 10 years ago

Congratulations. You've won today's "Find something to moan about" prize!

Seriously though - stop getting hung up on the word 'watch' - it's not the real point here. Nobody is arguing that telling the time doesn't require a full blown OS.

simple, elegant mechanics.

Have you ever looked inside a watch!

manarth2• 10 years ago

  > simple, elegant mechanics.
  Have you ever looked inside a watch!

Well, I'd grant the "elegant mechanics", getting all those teensy cogs and wheels and levers and bits to work together like, er, clockwork…

But "simple"? It's telling that the term for each feature on a watchface is "complication" :-D

coldtea4• 10 years ago

it goes against one time-honored watch tradition: simple, elegant mechanics.

So, just like every digital watch ever created?

aceperry3• 10 years ago

Great project. I had no idea the LG Urbane used an ARM Cortex-A processor. I have a few 1st gen Android watches, and those used the ST ARM cortex-M series micros. I have an LG Urbane as well, but wouldn't want to dump it since I find Android wear to be useful.

aceperry3• 10 years ago

Ooops, my bad. I was mistaken about the 1st gen Android wear watches. They also used Cortex-A processors and can be updated with AsteroidOS. I was thinking of other smart watches.

ensiferum3• 10 years ago

Something only a nerd can be excited about.

My Watch Runs GNU/Linux

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