Being an old Slashdot user, the first incredibly dumb thought of mine was "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" With a pic of Natalie Portman for the watch face, of course.
But, one fun thing I could imagine doing is using it as an incredibly portable PirateBox. Or any other use of a file server hiding in plain sight.
This is awesome. I got in on the smartwatch craze super early (like sony smartwatch 1), and the one thing I wished was for was some F/OSS to run on my watch (believe it or not sony smartwatch 1 actually had a dev kit), and to finally getting rid of the oddly-intrusive smartphone apps that came with most smartwatches. Hyped to hear someone actually did it with Asteroid OS (even if it's Alpha).
I also thought FirefoxOS would evolve to maybe get in this space, but I was mega wrong about that and lots of other things so there's that. I'm excited that Asteroid won't meet the same fate, but maybe I'm biased.
Also stumbled upon http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Main_Page while looking the repo for Asteriod. Excited to see what comes of this project and maybe even contribute in the future.
OE is very much a thing in embedded Linux. You might also want to look up the Yocto Project.
I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.
It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.
OE has been around a while, and while it has matured well it is still somewhat of a bridge to building bespoke distributions. It's a great start if you're looking to maintain a custom distribution for a custom product/form factor but it's a bit rough for end users. Worse still, there is little-to-no motivation for vendors to open up their products to their customers.
meanwhile, everyone's phone here runs gnu/linux but completely out of reach.
everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode. how does your 90s self feel about that?
> meanwhile, everyone's phone here runs gnu/linux but completely out of reach.
everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode.
Pretty sure there is no GNU component in iOS which is based on BSD. Also, Android uses only the Linux kernel, not even close to a GNU/Linux system.
Unfortunately there is no GNU on iOS or Android. Every open a terminal on an Android phone and wonder why things just don't feel like the GNU/Linux systems you're used to? It's because it uses things like busybox instead of the GNU coreutils.
I spend a good part of my day in one variant of a gnu/linux environment, whether it be development of apps (for which I use GNU/Emacs), or on a server administering stuff (which technically isn't gnu/linux), so having my fashion phone in kiosk mode feels pretty good, actually. I think I'd be pretty unhappy if the stuff I count as "work" in my mind bled over in to my personal life, and I love not having to jump through the same types of hoops I do for work just to make a simple phone call or send a text message.
My 90's self feels quite good knowing there are enough computers to hack among the big ones (and card sized, and the one on my TV (yes, with GNU/Linux), and the ones I rent...).
It would be great if my phone was completely under my control. But my priorities are getting my communication protocols back, and avoiding losing my desktops and servers. The phone can wait.
Feels great because my 90's self can look into the future of the early 2000's and see what Windows was like when malware first erupted on the scene and ordinary people were totally unprepared to handle it. I am happy to trade my freedom to tinker for that to not be a problem so I can do actual things I need to with my phone.
The Linux fork used on Android and the set of official NDK APIs, make it so that Google can at any Android release change the kernel for something else and only OEMs or devs using forbidden APIs will notice.
Since I own the same watch...I'm intrigued. Battery life is a concern (as is integration with some stuff). But yeah who am I kidding I'll try this and even if all it will ever do is display the time there's something to be said about "well yeah I got my Linux box right here!" :D
Remembering the "runs on a toaster" shirts I am now curious if NetBSD (or any BSD) will run on it. The thought that I never even considered messing with the watch makes me a bit sad (I've turned into too much of a consumer, not enough tinkerer left :P)
One of the big draws of buying and wearing a mechanical watch is the emotional feeling of something busily working away on your wrist. In the same way I would fine great joy in wearing a flavour of linux right on my wrist.
Absolutely - I'd love to see more along the lines of Tag Heuer's 'Connected' watches (which I think all have LCD faces), but stepping back to mechanical time.
At it's most basic, just a notification light that mirrors that on my phone/tablet.
Ideally, I think a ticker-tape-style circular display around the edge of the (real mechanical) watch face to give notification headings would be awesome.
I do love my Apple Watch, but I would also be thrilled if they put some sort of really fancy mechanical gizmo in there for the sole of having some ultra complex mechanical escapement only instead of software.
What GPU does it use? Is it a native GPU driver + Mesa or you use it with libhybris and Android blobs? Wayland is neat, but it's pretty annoying when there are no native drivers available. One of the problems with Android is, that it became like Windows of the past. Hardware makers produce Android drivers with closed userspace blobs, and leave it at that. Blobs built against bionic make running a proper glibc Linux on such devices a pain unless hacks like libhybris are deployed, or you manage to replace them with proper open drivers.
"AsteroidOS is built upon a rock-solid base system. Qt 5.6 and QML are used for fast and easy app development. OpenEmbedded provides a full GNU/Linux distribution and libhybris allows easy porting to most Android and Android Wear watches."
Love the hack but I can't agree that they're a fad. Long before smartwatches my cousin had a bluetooth watch connected to his phone. And today I have a smartwatch connected to my phone to avoid having to stop and take it out when I'm on a bike. I bike everywhere, like thousands others where I live.
So there's clearly a market for some sort of wrist-device that makes using your phone easier.
The thing that makes it feel like a stupid fad is when you have to charge it every day and therefore forget to put it on. It hasn't become habitual quite yet.
Which is why I love my smartwatch for having an e-ink display and not an amoled display. So even after more than a year of operation I still only charge it once a week.
While I don't find this that impressive. I do find amazing that a quad-core 1.2GHz machine with half a gig of RAM can fit in that tiny package of hardware.
Its hard for me to consider a smartwatch when my current watch is solar powered and I haven't had to change batteries for the last 8 years. Maybe when these can run on a charge for 2+ weeks at a time I might consider it.
My two killer "apps" are a google authenticator like app (OATH OTP token generator) and notifications.
Being able to glance at my wrist and see if I need to get my phone out is pretty nice. I don't try to be inconspicuous in meetings or anything, but when I'm doing something, or walking down the street, etc., it's nice to be able to decide if I need to stop and handle it (like a call from my wife or the daycare), or can ignore it, like an email from a newsletter.
And with 2FA everywhere, it's nice to have a standalone token generator that I can wear. The one on my pebble is strictly offline operation (doesn't need the phone connected), which means it's even useful if I break/loose my phone or the battery's dead or something.
Music control is pretty cool as well. But mostly for things like when I'm doing the dishes, swimming in the pool/at the beach, or in the shower. My Pebble is fully waterproof, so I only take it off to charge every few days. So I can stream music from my phone to a bluetooth speaker, and control it without needing to handle my phone.
For me, killer application is basic usable text input. I'd love to covertly send text messages, write down some thoughts and TODO items, while still maintaining eye contact and following discussion.
For it to be usable, it should not require sight and higher typing speeds should be achievable by training. This rules out virtual querty keyboards and predictive suggestions. I think glyph recognition would be usable, but also other gesture systems would work if they don't demand supervision by sight.
My first goal would be to set up a working jasper [https://jasperproject.github.io/] or "jarvis" type of voice-controlled system. Admittedly, there aren't that many use-cases, more of a "cool to implement" sort of thing. But it would be cool to speak voice commands into my smart watch.
In a movie, we'd be disabling CCTV cameras from it as we ran through corridors of the Pentagon, y'know, hacking stuff.
In reality, I think the author just did it for its own sake:
> I ended up with a free LG Watch Urbane ... I realized that smartwatches were just a fad (for me at least), and this was a device I could experiment with.
For me it's notifications. Calendar alerts, texts, app notifications, and alarms are much easier and less disruptive to look at on your wrist than to pull out your phone. It's a much better experience.
I run Asteroid OS on the old LG watch (which I also got for free; probably a prime market for this OS). It's still in alpha so it's fairly buggy. But it looks really nice, particularly for being FOSS. It can (in principle) do notifications, weather, and music control. I look forward to them smoothing it all over, but I wear it already.
This is amazing (I also have a moment of amazement at my smartphone every so often).
But an issue is power usage. (eg) ubuntu runs on a smartphone, but with much shorter battery life than android. (Tho TBF, I don't know the power efficiency of Asteroid OS).
One side-benefit of non-rooting linux (eg termux, terminalIDE) is retaining battery life.
However, Asteroid OS is open source, which counts for a lot!
This needs a microphone. Would be great to be able to drive activity via voice, or make reminders. If it had some kind of bluetooth/wifi also then you could send emails via dictation but I guess the size/battery constraints rule that out.
This would be extremely appealing if it had sufficient I/O to make it into a mobile, basically headless computer you could hook up to whatever display or input was handy. Looks like it only has a single MicroUSB port though.
[+] [-] RhodaLs|9 years ago|reply
But, one fun thing I could imagine doing is using it as an incredibly portable PirateBox. Or any other use of a file server hiding in plain sight.
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|9 years ago|reply
I also thought FirefoxOS would evolve to maybe get in this space, but I was mega wrong about that and lots of other things so there's that. I'm excited that Asteroid won't meet the same fate, but maybe I'm biased.
Also stumbled upon http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Main_Page while looking the repo for Asteriod. Excited to see what comes of this project and maybe even contribute in the future.
[+] [-] joatmon-snoo|9 years ago|reply
I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.
It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|9 years ago|reply
everyone bought a computer from an advertising (google) or fashion (apple) company that only runs in kiosk mode. how does your 90s self feel about that?
[+] [-] AlexeyBrin|9 years ago|reply
Pretty sure there is no GNU component in iOS which is based on BSD. Also, Android uses only the Linux kernel, not even close to a GNU/Linux system.
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|9 years ago|reply
My desktop machine is still a desktop machine.
[+] [-] davexunit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blauditore|9 years ago|reply
But it hurts as a power user.
[+] [-] eddieroger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nix0n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|9 years ago|reply
It would be great if my phone was completely under my control. But my priorities are getting my communication protocols back, and avoiding losing my desktops and servers. The phone can wait.
[+] [-] redblacktree|9 years ago|reply
It's a knife to the heart when you put it that way.
[+] [-] JunkDNA|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtk40|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
The Linux fork used on Android and the set of official NDK APIs, make it so that Google can at any Android release change the kernel for something else and only OEMs or devs using forbidden APIs will notice.
[+] [-] AsyncAwait|9 years ago|reply
1 - https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=termux&fdid=...
[+] [-] jsz0|9 years ago|reply
This type of attitude just discourages people from ever wanting to leave the so-called kiosk mode.
[+] [-] kriro|9 years ago|reply
Remembering the "runs on a toaster" shirts I am now curious if NetBSD (or any BSD) will run on it. The thought that I never even considered messing with the watch makes me a bit sad (I've turned into too much of a consumer, not enough tinkerer left :P)
[+] [-] api_or_ipa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|9 years ago|reply
At it's most basic, just a notification light that mirrors that on my phone/tablet.
Ideally, I think a ticker-tape-style circular display around the edge of the (real mechanical) watch face to give notification headings would be awesome.
[+] [-] MBCook|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbutler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrice_d|9 years ago|reply
"AsteroidOS is built upon a rock-solid base system. Qt 5.6 and QML are used for fast and easy app development. OpenEmbedded provides a full GNU/Linux distribution and libhybris allows easy porting to most Android and Android Wear watches."
[+] [-] INTPenis|9 years ago|reply
So there's clearly a market for some sort of wrist-device that makes using your phone easier.
The thing that makes it feel like a stupid fad is when you have to charge it every day and therefore forget to put it on. It hasn't become habitual quite yet.
Which is why I love my smartwatch for having an e-ink display and not an amoled display. So even after more than a year of operation I still only charge it once a week.
[+] [-] jff|9 years ago|reply
Yep, pretty amazing that a quad-core 1.2GHz machine with half a gig of RAM can run more than one thing at a time!
[+] [-] globuous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcapitan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajford|9 years ago|reply
Being able to glance at my wrist and see if I need to get my phone out is pretty nice. I don't try to be inconspicuous in meetings or anything, but when I'm doing something, or walking down the street, etc., it's nice to be able to decide if I need to stop and handle it (like a call from my wife or the daycare), or can ignore it, like an email from a newsletter.
And with 2FA everywhere, it's nice to have a standalone token generator that I can wear. The one on my pebble is strictly offline operation (doesn't need the phone connected), which means it's even useful if I break/loose my phone or the battery's dead or something.
Music control is pretty cool as well. But mostly for things like when I'm doing the dishes, swimming in the pool/at the beach, or in the shower. My Pebble is fully waterproof, so I only take it off to charge every few days. So I can stream music from my phone to a bluetooth speaker, and control it without needing to handle my phone.
[+] [-] veli_joza|9 years ago|reply
For it to be usable, it should not require sight and higher typing speeds should be achievable by training. This rules out virtual querty keyboards and predictive suggestions. I think glyph recognition would be usable, but also other gesture systems would work if they don't demand supervision by sight.
[+] [-] mxuribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|9 years ago|reply
In reality, I think the author just did it for its own sake:
> I ended up with a free LG Watch Urbane ... I realized that smartwatches were just a fad (for me at least), and this was a device I could experiment with.
[+] [-] driverdan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fit2rule|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orblivion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|9 years ago|reply
But an issue is power usage. (eg) ubuntu runs on a smartphone, but with much shorter battery life than android. (Tho TBF, I don't know the power efficiency of Asteroid OS).
One side-benefit of non-rooting linux (eg termux, terminalIDE) is retaining battery life.
However, Asteroid OS is open source, which counts for a lot!
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravypod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuffaloBagel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branchless|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h4nkoslo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpl56|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewmorgan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 72deluxe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teaearlgraycold|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmp|9 years ago|reply