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Has anyone tried to get webOS to work?

I am looking to see how much work it would be to modify it to work or if webOS would have problems without heavy modification.

Alex Chamberlain
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Kaminara
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  • I have just upvoted you back to 0. This is a raspberry pi community but webOS is open source so it is a perfectly valid question. – Shane Hudson Jun 13 '12 at 13:58
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    Not sure why this is being downvoted. – Jivings Jun 13 '12 at 19:00
  • It's open-source and has a large homebrew community, so I see no reason why not. Perhaps it's a question worth taking to the webOS community and trying to gather some interest. – Jivings Jun 13 '12 at 01:02
  • FYI, the "webOS is open source" comment is slightly more complicated than it would appear at first glance. webOS isn't open source, but almost all of its components will be open-sourced when Open webOS is released. See my answer for more. – Zoot Jul 11 '12 at 16:55

2 Answers2

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I think that Open webOS is going to be a more feasible solution than webOS if you're looking to port the operating system to the Raspberry Pi. HP has open-sourced a platform portability layer called the "Nyx Project" to help abstract some of the complications from the porting process. It's available on github here.

Open webOS 1.0 hasn't been released yet. It is currently slated for release in September 2012, and it may take some time before porting Open webOS to RPi gets any traction, but it is theoretically possible. Keep an eye on the Open webOS website to keep up to date the project's status.

EDIT: The beta of Open webOS was recently announced on their blog. It includes two builds, one for desktop and another for OpenEmbedded. This statement appears in the post

Our OpenEmbedded build provides the ideal development environment for porting webOS to new and exciting devices.

UPDATE: A video was posted onto youtube by user aaa801 showing Open webOS booting on a raspberry pi, although at this point it's booting into the console and the GUI does not appear to be functioning yet.

Zoot
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The big problem porting WebOS is the graphic part, I don't think the information about the Broadcom's integrated video accelerator is openly available and it will be hard to port an OS to it without that information. But sure, you can do this, but it is a LOT of work.

FarhadA
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  • I don't think it's correct. Although porting graphical layer would probably be the hardest work, it shouldn't really be related in any way to the broadcom informations about graphical chipset. There is OpenGL ES for RaspberryPi and that should be enough to make use of graphical acceleration. And at least Open Webkit seems to be using QT for graphical renderings so this should make things even easier. – Krzysztof Adamski Oct 04 '12 at 15:42