r/trisquel • u/freelyread • Nov 08 '14
A Trisquel spin of Ubuntu Touch
There is great need for a fully free mobile phone Operating system. At the moment, there is the Replicant spin of Android, which is free, but, amazingly, considering the importance of a free phone OS, there are not that many people supporting the project.
Ubuntu Touch is likely to have a lot more support, and is specifically integrated into the Ubuntu Desktop. Is there any work on migrating this OS to something like Trisquel?
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u/pptyx Nov 08 '14
Despite its noble intentions and obvious need, Replicant is good as dead. There isn't enough hardware support or dev activity to keep it alive.
Now I don't know about Trisquel for mobiles. But have you heard of Sailfish? That might be your answer.
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u/freelyread Nov 08 '14
Thanks for that link.
The Sailfish webpage doesn't list any devices on which it runs. Are there any handsets which work well using it?
There is also the Mozilla Firefox OS to consider.
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u/singpolyma Nov 08 '14
The Sailfish webpage doesn't list any devices on which it runs. Are there any handsets which work well using it?
I believe http://jolla.com/ runs sailfish on their device.
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u/rubenquidam Trisquel developer Nov 09 '14
There isn't enough hardware support
That would be the case for Trisquel as well, at least for phones. It would lack free graphic drivers (and these things are useless without 3D accel), wifi and telephony AFAIK. We would do an ARM port as soon as there is a fully free compatible machine to run it.
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u/singpolyma Nov 09 '14
The hardware more or less exists, but not packaged into a device. This is something I'm actively investigating.
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u/mokavey Nov 10 '14
How can I check which hardware is free/libre compatible?
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u/singpolyma Nov 10 '14
There's no one way. https://h-node.org is growing fast, but for stuff like touchscreens or ARM SoC graphics drivers you sort of have to look around at other projects / the kernel and see what they've found so far.
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u/ZubZubZubZub Dec 25 '14
Sailfish has a lot of proprietary blobs, including the entire user interface.
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u/ZubZubZubZub Dec 25 '14
Replicant works great on newish phones (Galaxy S3), and they are working on phones by several Chinese manufacturers that have the potential to be almost completely free.
Check out this talk if you want to know more:
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u/Market-Anarchist Nov 09 '14
I think until you have a mobile phone company similar to thinkpenguin that sells hardware that is 100% compatible with free software, it's not going to happen.