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LuneOS November Stable Release: Doppio

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A coffee machine fills twin cups: Doppio

LuneOS Doppio release.

The very long wait is over #LuneOS and #webOS fans! We’re finally back with a new release called “Doppio” which we believe will be a milestone in terms of developments and the way forward!

So you’re wondering what we’ve been up to for the past year?

Well, actually a whole lot to be honest! We have upgraded the bluetooth stack from BlueZ4 to BlueZ5 which required quite some work to the kernels. This has been successfully completed for the Nexus 4 (Mako) and Nexus 5 (Hammerhead); unfortunately to date we haven’t been able to get this to work on the Touchpad (4G) (Tenderloin).

We have been working closely together with the Halium project and have made further integrations between LuneOS and Halium reducing duplication between the projects and using a single source where possible. This all to be more easily integrated, and to facilitate ports to newer devices. We have upstreamed our kernel patches (mainly to fix GCC 5/6/7/8 compatibility) to Halium so we can use a shared kernel for our targets.

Talking about new devices we’ve been working on: Since Google dropped the (budget) Nexus line and launched the (premium) Pixel line, we’ve been looking for other targets that are easily available, budget friendly and have good community support. We quickly ended up with Xiaomi which makes phones with decent specs, unlockable bootloader (the process is a bit tedious, but it’s do-able) and the phones give very good value for money.

This has resulted in us independently working on 3 different Xiaomi devices being the RedMi Note 4x (Mido), RedMi 5 (Rosy) and Mi A1 (Tissot).  These are all Aarch64 devices using the Snapdragon 625 chipset. We didn’t have any Aarch64 devices before and also they are based upon Halium 7.1 (Android 7.1) while all our previous targets were based upon Halium 5.1 (Android 5.1), so this brought a whole bunch of new challenges. There are still a few rough edges, but audio, sensors, wifi and bluetooth are now working. There was also quite some porting work done for some of the other Halium supported targets such as the OnePlus X (onyx), Google/Huawei Nexus 6P (angler) and Motorola G4 (athene). These are currently in various stages of development, whereby OnePlus X is the most mature.

The Xiaomi Mi A1 is a strategic device for us which we chose in cooperation with LG, to get LuneOS running on it and also as a target for LG’s webOS OSE (Open Source Edition).

LG’s release of webOS OSE came as a surprise to us, however it has great potential. Though the initial release of webOS OSE was very limited and therefore limited use case for people not being very familiar with webOS, it does offer a lot of potential for us. webOS OSE is basically 5 years of development of the core webOS bits since Open webOS was released. It has been deployed in millions of LG TV’s since and offers great improvements in terms of reliability and functionality. The big downside however is that there’s no record of the changes between Open webOS and webOS OSE, so this is making the migration a bit more challenging.

Early June the LuneOS team met with LG in Paris to discuss collaboration between our teams. As a result of this we have chosen the Xiaomi A1 as a device to port LuneOS to. This is now at a level similar to our other targets.

After this release we will therefore focus on migrating our Open webOS components to the updated components provided by webOS OSE. This will bring quite some challenges and hurdles along the way, however we’re positive that we can complete this migration and it will bring a lot of improvements in terms of code quality, stability, functionality and reducing the need for maintaining a lot of these components ourselves since we can share a common codebase with LG’s webOS OSE going forward.

LG has a very clear vision in mind for webOS. Since the initial release in March, a roadmap has been published and LG has pushed out 4 releases since the original release of webOS OSE.

The following items on our to-do list will be where we focus next:

Known issues:

Changelog

Applications:

User Interface:

System Level:

The usual

1. Sign up for the bug tracker

2. Get involved and

3. Join the mailing list

Download and Install

Feel free to download the updated builds to get started. Tenderloin, Mako, Hammerhead and Tissot remain our focus for now, but the emulator, Mido & Rosy work too.

Please note that in order to use the latest stable builds Nexus 4 (Mako) and Nexus 5 (Hammerhead) you need to flash the CM 12.1 images first using CWM/TWRP. In order to do so, you might be required to do a “factory reset” or at least “wipe cache”. CWM/TWRP will indicate when this is needed. After successfully flashing CM 12.1, make sure to boot it at least once before going back to CWM/TWRP to flash the latest LuneOS image! We have provided links to CM 12.1 for these 3 images on our device pages below.

Installation instructions for TouchPad (Tenderloin), Nexus 4 (Mako), Nexus 5 (Hammerhead) and Emulator are on the wiki. And remember we don’t do timelines.

Don’t forget to contact us with any questions and feel free to join the discussion on the webOS Nation forums. Catch us on Twitter @webosports on IRC: Freenode:#webos-ports or email webos.ports@gmail.com.

We will see you shortly again with a new release!

Picture Credit: Chevanon. Cropped & flipped. Text added.

Related posts:

LuneOS July Stable Release: Cortado LuneOS February Stable Release: Chai Latte LuneOS September Stable Release: Decaf LuneOS December Stable Release: Cappuccino
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