LG has announced the release of an open platform WebOS Open Source Edition

LG Electronics announced the availability of webOS Open Source Edition, designed primarily for developers, allowing other companies to use it in their devices. This enables other companies to use webOS Open Source Edition in their products: TVs, IoT devices, tablets, or smartphones.

Version 1.0 of the new webOS OSE is optimized for Raspberry Pi 3, however, support for new platforms is not far off. The setup page contains instructions on how to build the firmware for downloading from a microSD card. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, 4-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GiB RAM and 100 GiB disk space is required for the assembly.

Prehistory

Palm introduced webOS for the first time in January 2009 at CES in Las Vegas. The new operating system based on the Linux kernel was designed for the Palm Pre smartphone and was called Palm webOS .

In April 2010, Hewlett-Packard bought Palm along with webOS for $ 1.2 billion. HP originally built ambitious plans to use webOS as a universal platform for all embedded devices and printers, to the detriment of Windows. Many people remember HP TouchPad on webOS 3.0.

Then something went wrong and in Hewlett-Packard it was decided to open the webOS source code, refusing to further promote products with this OS. The new open source operating system was uncomplicatedly named Open webOS .

LG Electronics acquired the source codes and all associated assets related to webOS from HP five years ago. For years, LG Electronics has used the operating system in smart TV and various IoT devices.

On September 1, 2014, the first version of LuneOS , the fork of Open webOS , was released, since LG’s webOS platform development was carried out behind closed doors, unlike Open webOS, as part of an open project in the depths of HP.

Specifications

Over time, LG realized all the benefits of developing a mobile operating system with open source, placing the project with all the latest developments under the open license Apache 2.0.

The development management model is quite in the spirit of projects of this kind - the maintainers are at the top, the usual developers on the floor below, the community advances both, according to the contribution of each to the common cause.

The main repository build-webos built on the basis of the build infrastructure of OpenEmbedded packages. The assembly also uses a set of software interfaces ^[1] and a collection of meta-data Yocto .

The feature of webOS is that there are enough web technologies for developing applications . In this regard, webOS OSE is successive to its heritage, the application development toolkit consists of HTML5, CSS and Enact ^[3] .

Basic component set

• LS2 API for registering and invoking interfaces required by applications and system services.
• A new composite manager based on the Wayland protocol is involved.
• Systemd system manager with bootd bootloader and bootd sound server.
• Unlike Open webOS , the new version uses Chromium 53. Integration with Wayland is carried out via the Ozone compatibility module update.
• DB8 - data storage in JSON format, uses LevelDB as a backend.

User interface

WebOS OSE is built on Qt 5.6 and Blink, ^[2] replacing WebKit. The new version of SysMgr divided into two modules: SAM and LSM . Some system applications are written using QML , such as and Home Launcher .

Service Management

• Added i18n localization support.
• uMediaServer - Provides the interface of the media player, access rights management and resources.
• System Application Manager - Manages applications and system services.
• Luna Surface Manager - System interaction with the user.

Used materials

1. webOS Open Source Edition :: Architecture
2. Open source version of webOS launches with smart device focus
3. LG has published the operating system webOS Open Source Edition

Notes

1. Both projects are used to create distributions with embedded Linux OS. ↑
   
2. Open engine for web browser. ↑
   
3. Integrated software package based on React libraries. ↑