Open webOS ported to Nexus 7 over holiday break

The Nexus 7 webOS port in action.

A member of the WebOS Ports team has ported Open webOS to the Nexus 7. The hardware of the Google tablet is supported quite well according to the developer's wiki with working Wi-Fi and brightness controls for the screen functional and accessible through a new Enyo 2 based settings app.

The port was done over the Christmas break by Simon Busch (aka morphis) who made use of the existing Galaxy Nexus port and libhybris. The latter library, which makes it easier to use bionic-based Android code on a glibc-based system, was developed by Carsten Munk, leader of the Mer project and currently employed by Jolla.

A video shows the progress made with the port in a short space of time:

The Nexus 7 port of Open webOS demonstrated.

There are no installable images currently available for the Open webOS port; the development work is still in the early stages and despite successfully creating a port that runs without needing to be tethered to a PC to boot, as
The task manager of webOS is smooth. some other ports do, users who want to install it on their Nexus 7 will have to build the OS themselves. Once built, the user will then have to install and test their build and be prepared to lose data or have to reinstall "at a moment's notice without warning and without any regrets or complaints."

The WebOS Ports team are porting Open webOS to a number of devices, including the original HP Touchpad, the Google Galaxy Nexus and the Samsung Slate 7. An attempt to port to the Raspberry Pi failed due to problems getting Qt4 running sufficiently well on the device.

(djwm)