Tag Archives: webOS Ports

Christmas News Crumbs, 2016

We send our best wishes to our readers at this time of year. To those that celebrate Christmas, other seasonal festivals or none at all, be of good cheer for webOS still seems to be here for another year!

News crumbs is where we briefly note stories that may have some interest to webOS users. In light of the season, this one will be a little ‘fatter’. Let’s talk turkey.

  • The start of this month saw the arrival of a new app for webOS. The occasional app still appears along with the various fixes and patches that keep the system running despite the time that has passed since any official, corporate support from it’s creators. These gifts are usually unexpected, so pleasant surprises. DianBao, a client for the Telegram messaging service, may have brought an additional gift. Singaporean developer and forum member, ‘mrrekcuf’ originally created the app as a prize-winning entry for a competition to make a Blackberry 10 app. To port it to Legacy webOS has also meant porting the Qt5 cross-platform application framework. It is this up to date version that has allowed many of the new features of LuneOS, including a modern browser. It remains to be seen if this development will lead anywhere, but if one thing could bring yet another lease of life to Legacy webOS, a new browser would be it. Comment thread.
  • At webOS Ports, the build servers will be down for the last few days of 2016. Don’t panic! It is only for maintenance and upgrades. LuneOS developers take note.
  • For those developing apps for LG webOS televisions, note that LG’s developer website will also be shut down just after Christmas. Again, it is merely to allow for a new, improved site! Here’s the announcement. From the 27th the new web address will be: webostv.developer.lge.com
  • Over the years, webOS enthusiasts have experienced highs and lows from the Consumer Electronics Show. At this time of year we look to the start of January to see what items of interest may be exhibited in Las Vegas. One such item is the LG Probeam laser projector. While only a slight step to a new product category, this at least shows LG’s continuing commitment to webOS in their audio / visual products. Comment thread.
  • News that may be of interest to Palm fans is that TCL / Alcatel has signed a license deal with Blackberry to produce phones (the last couple of BB phones were rebranded TCL models). New products may well be exhibited at CES next month. Notable for us was TCL’s purchase of the ‘Palm’ brand almost two years ago. Since that announcement, there has only been silence… Comment thread.
  • Another gift! This time it is for PalmOS users. Games company, Astraware have published the registration codes of games for PalmOS and other old systems. You will need to dig out the apps from your archive (or get them by other means), but you can now activate them on new or reset devices. Comment thread.
  • Remember Classic? It was the PalmOS emulator you could use to run old Palm apps on webOS. Those who follow us on Twitter, may have noticed a few retweets when former editor of webOS Nation, Dieter Bohn announced a redesign of his current site, The Verge. He rashly promised a sticker for the first screen shot of the site on a Palm Pre. Alan Morford is not one to do things by halves.

That’s it for now. See you in the new year with an announcement about pivotCE.

LuneOS June Stable Release: Caffè Tobio

Time flew, already another month passed since our previous release. We have been working hard on improving the stability of LuneOS and especially fixing a lot of minor QA issues in the Yocto build system we’re using. These were mainly QA warnings, but we didn’t have much chance to address these previously. These are all sorted now, so for new developers building from scratch it will mean they won’t run into errors or warnings.

We have been also looking into improving the stability and fixing some of the regression bugs that we had after we updated a large number of the system components in the previous release.
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LuneOS May Stable Release: Café mocha

Welcome to May, LuneOS fans! It’s been over 2 months since our last stable release, but don’t worry: We have been working extremely hard in bringing a lot of updates to the underlying system.

These kinds of upgrades on the lower level of our OS have significant impact and usually lead to some regressions as well. This was one of the reasons why we didn’t have a release last month and the release this month is a bit later than usual. We wanted to iron out some critical bugs first.

Check out what we’ve been up to and get to the builds!

Continue reading LuneOS May Stable Release: Café mocha

LuneOS Update for April

In the latter part of March, webOS Ports upgraded two major parts of the LuneOS system. The Yocto project is what we use to deploy an embedded Linux system to our target devices. Last month we moved to the latest version, named Jethro. In addition, the Qt framework we use for our GUI and system apps has just reached version 5.6 and we have upgraded our builds accordingly. The price of keeping LuneOS at the cutting edge is that major upgrades like these can break other parts of the system that rely on them. Fixing these glitches means it is difficult to produce a stable build of LuneOS, so in April we will focus on progressing the transition rather than making a stable build. We have been able to make great progress with regards to stability, however we still have a few important issues to iron out as well.

BUT we do have nightlies still coming. The latest of which are available for Grouper (Nexus 7), Maguro (Galaxy Nexus), Mako (Nexus 4), emulator, and Tenderloin (HP TouchPad). Don’t forget the latest uImage for TouchPad. We now also build nightly images for the Raspberry Pi 2. We’re ironing out a few final issues with the Raspberry Pi 3 build, so those images can be built in our build environment as well.

So what’s new? First off, we have a new supported device: Raspberry Pi 2! This was pending for a while, but we finally solved the obstacles on our build environment and images are now generated as part of our nightly build process. Also, the Raspberry Pi 3 port build is working on local machines, however we need to iron out a few issues before we can have builds on our server as well. More to come there.

Continue reading LuneOS Update for April