Oleg Romashin, a Nokia engineer, has been working on porting Firefox OS (previously known as Boot 2 Gecko) to the Raspberry Pi, and has uploaded a YouTube video showing a Firefox OS running on the device, including a WebGL teapot demo running at 60 fps. This Firefox OS build is based on Debian Squeezy, with plain EGL rendering, no Widget Toolkit backends and no X11. Some parts do not look very smooth yet, but this demo looks promising.
If you want to try it yourself, you can download the WebGL teapot build. Mozilla patches with LinuxGL widget backend are also available at http://hg.mozilla.org/users/romaxa_gmail.com/embedipc_queue/file/linuxglpure. If you have the N9 smartphone or Beagleboard, it looks like you can also try this. Check files in http://romaxa.info/b2g/.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Wow! The part starting at 1:30 is interesting to me: that’s FirefoxOS! As FirefoxOS is built for light weight hardware, it could be ideal for the Raspi. Android 4.x is too heavy for the Raspi’s 256MB RAM, isn’t it?
Furthermore:
What … a Nokia engineer working on something else than Windows Phone … ?! 😉
‘tearpot’ = typo
@Sander
That’s also my understanding that Firefox OS is more suited to low-end hardware than Android 4.0.
If you look at his Linkedin page, you’ll see that he works on browsers for Nokia, including the Mozilla gecko engine.
Tips how to get it working on Raspbian armhf? I get the error below, but the file does exist…
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $ ./b2g
XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /home/pi/kul/b2g/libxpcom.so:
/home/pi/kul/b2g/libxpcom.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Couldn’t load XPCOM.
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $ file libxpcom.so
libxpcom.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=0xb91ddee75d90d37d6b3c8d7dd762b3bdd2dab3b5, not stripped
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $ file /home/pi/kul/b2g/libxpcom.so
/home/pi/kul/b2g/libxpcom.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=0xb91ddee75d90d37d6b3c8d7dd762b3bdd2dab3b5, not stripped
pi@raspberrypi ~/kul/b2g $
@Sander
I haven’t tried it, I’m playing with CX-01 for a few days now. I don’t know how to check whether a binary is armel or armhf.
But while searching for “Couldn’t load XPCOM”, I found some people simply had to set export LD_LIBRARY_PATH= correctly.
I got it working on a Raspi with the Debian Wheezy Beta image, not with the Raspbian image.
See http://eva-quirinius.blogspot.nl/2012/08/installing-firefoxos-on-raspi.html