On 04/15/2014 11:50 AM, WestHurley ComputerReCycling wrote:
Am looking for small alternative distros to use with hardware challenged
older android devices.
Would be only using basic apps like audio recorder, camera and video, no
CellPhone, Internet or WiFi.
Hope someone has already done this and can offer suggestions.
This is a job for......FirefoxOS.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/
Actually, it's not neccessarily a good solution since you will have to
figure out how to compile it for your specific machinery.
As of 4.2, Android is basically "Linux plus some bits" - where those
"bits" at a gross level are instead of using an XWindows based windows
manager[unity, cinnamon, etc] they use their own custom windows manager
which provides a restricted API to app developers and has to be
programmed in Java.
Android on a commercial cell phone is "Open Source Andorid plus some
bits" where those bits are all the binary blobs needed to actually use
things like the camera and the 3g modem.
FirefoxOS, by the same token, is "Android plus bits" - where primarily
they replace the Android windows manager with their own custom, lighter
window manager. Instead of writing apps in Java, you write them in
html5, css, and javascript.
It's target platform is exactly the one you are looking at, low end
CPU's compared to the current latest/greatest CPU's Android is focused
on. As such, they don't provide the full, rich experience of a
'smartphone' but aim to provide a semi-smartphone.
In any case, if you can get it to compile and run you should have MOST
of what your interested in. The problematic pieces will be the camera,
wifi, 3g, and bluetooth. Those 4 items frequently use binary blobs to
enable them - so it will all be based on whether or not there is an open
source driver for those chips already written. Many cameras are
supported, same for wifi and bluetooth. 3g is rare.
-Gary
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