Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-gets-a-firefox-os-port-20120816/

by 11031a • 14 years ago

69 22 14 years ago

skrebbel• 14 years ago

With any windowing system running so slow, how will porting all that to JavaScript improve matters?

However let's turn that the other way: One of the Pi's cooler features is its digital I/O's. Will this mean they'll add GPIO support to Firefox OS then? And maybe to Firefox, too?

"This web site wants to control your hand-soldered peripherals. [Allow] [Don't allow]" - Cool!

jlongster• 14 years ago

I didn't notice any part of that being "so slow". Sure, the system UI isn't quite as snappy as it could be, but Mozilla has several months to work on it. Usually most of the visible performance optimizations happen near then end, and I bet they'll get it pretty smooth.

RossM2• 14 years ago

Indeed, the Android port is actually faster than my phone.

daeken• 14 years ago

There's a lot of work going on performance-wise right now, especially on the gfx side. We should be seeing some serious performance benefits soon; honestly, I'm amazed that WebGL apps run as well as they do right now -- they're getting a huge boost soon.

soapdog• 14 years ago

Telefonica will use Firefox OS on feature phones with specs that are below Raspberry Pi.

There is a difference between running Ubuntu and just running a little OS using Linux kernel.

qdot76367• 14 years ago

FxOS could very well add GPIO. Bluetooth is currently in the works for FxOS v1 (it'll be certified apps only for v1, but it should expose RFCOMM sockets all the way up through JS, so the potential is there), and host-mode USB has been talked about for later versions. Basically, the idea is "if it's the phone, we should be able to access it". As things branch out, hopefully that'll morph into "if it's on the hardware, we should be able to access it"

happycube• 14 years ago

X on Raspbian is not GPU accelerated. Since the CPU (but not the GPU!) is a bit anemic even by current ARM SoC standards, that's a big deal.

Firefox OS is accelerated, running on top of OpenGL ES. :)

st3fan2• 14 years ago

Nice. Another nice board to run on is the Panda Board. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

It is a popular board at Mozilla to do development and testing on.

nickbp• 14 years ago

I dunno, you can buy 5 $35 raspberry pis for the price of one $200 pandaboard. $200 approaches the territory of being plausibly enough to build or purchase a full PC.

shardling• 14 years ago

I imagine the comment was aimed at those who already have pandaboards. It wasn't a salespitch.

freehunter3• 14 years ago

I was quite disappointed in my RPi buying experience, living in the US. I'm still waiting for it to arrive (despite preordering the minute the sites came back online). They notified me that it was being shipped a couple weeks ago, told me that shipping would be about 12 weeks. The exchange rate threw me for a heck of a shock, with my RPi costing about $50 minus shipping.

The RPi might be the soup du jour, but it's an incredibly frustrating device to get your hands on. At least the Pandaboard can be placed in my hands; for all I know the RPi might not even exist at all.

tracker1• 14 years ago

Have to agree... at $200, and AMD E-350 ITX board + 8GB of ram is cheaper, and more capable.

st3fan2• 14 years ago

True. But you get what you pay for. The Raspberry Pi is extremely low end. Slow CPU, tiny bit of memory.

If that works for you then awesome.

However, if you want something that is more in line with today's mid to high end phones then the Pandaboard probably comes closer.

reustle• 14 years ago

That glass skull demo was pretty damn impressive. I don't think my primary computer 5 years ago could have rendered it that well.

Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port

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