Mozilla has been moving quickly ahead with its mobile operating system, which is dubbed “Firefox OS,” and photos of it have been appearing online, as seen here. It looks a lot like other graphical, mobile operating systems for smartphones, although Mozilla stresses that it is strictly built on open standards. Now, a Nokia researcher has put Firefox OS on–of all platforms–the Raspberry Pi. And, there is video to prove it.
Tom Brewster reports on the researcher’s successful effort on Techweek Europe, the same site that has been steadily posting photos of Firefox OS:
“Oleg Romashin, a Nokia engineer who has worked on open source OS MeeGo over the last year, has released a video showing how he made the incomplete, Linux-based Firefox OS work on the Raspberry Pi. Whilst it shows little more of the operating system than the latest batch of photos sent to us from Mozilla, it still looks rather swish. And it proves what clever things people can do on the machine with open source software around. Oleg has also made the work-in-progress available for download (direct tarball download link only) so anyone can play.”
Even native applications in Firefox OS are written in HTML5 and it promises to be an operating system that is widely tinkered with. As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi is attracting developers and tinkerers (who are putting many operating systems on it), and we’ve also noted that it could succeed where projects like One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) ran into roadblocks–in the educational market.
One thing’s for sure: Experiments are continuing, far and wide, with both Raspberry Pi and Firefox OS.
