PreCentral: Open webOS Beta made official, supports Ubuntu and OpenEmbedded

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As we noted earlier today, one of our eagle-eyed forum members spotted that HP had opened up the build scripts and other open source components for the first Open webOS beta, and that said build of Open webOS was installable on Ubuntu. Well, turns out HP wasn't done open sourcing everything yet, and a short time later the OpenEmbedded build system was also announced. If you're not familiar with OpenEmbedded, it's a build framework for embedded Linux (the base of webOS) to support installs on embedded devices. In the case of Open webOS, the use of OpenEmbedded will make it easier to bring webOS onto new hardware, though it doesn't outright make it work on anything - there's still work you'd have to do. We've looked at the build instructions for the embedded version of Open webOS, and we'll be honest, it's waaaaaay over our heads here.

OpenEmbedded will work with the ongoing ARM codebase of webOS, with the Beta release also including an ARM emulator for testing it. The emulator includes core services like db8, node.js, and the other services that make Open webOS tick. The desktop build, meanwhile, supports running System Manager (LunaSysMgr) as a standalone app on your Ubuntu machine, letting you run the core applications (Calendar, Email, et al) inside it. Oh, and 'many' third part Enyo apps are supported as well, but as we expect Open webOS to be missing some components that couldn't be replaced with open source, some of the stuff your app depends on might not be there.

It's taken several months to get here, and there's still some stuff to do. But this beta milestone marks the release of 54 separate webOS components to open source, totalling 450,000 lines of code.

At the very least we're excited to see that something like OpenEmbedded has been implemented with Open webOS. It's one step closer to being able to install the operating system on… something. What exactly, remains to be seen. But at least we know from the screenshot above that it's not going to look much different at all - it's still webOS.

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