Huawei in Talks To Install Russian OS On Tablets For Country's Population Census (reuters.com) 40
China's Huawei has begun talks with Russia about installing Russian operating system (OS) Aurora on 360,000 of its tablets to conduct Russia's population census next year, Reuters reported Monday, citing two sources. From the report: Huawei has been seeking alternative operating systems to Google's Android OS after Washington put the world's second-largest smartphone maker on a so-called Entity List that threatens to cut off its access to the essential U.S. components and technology. "This is a pilot project. We see it as the first stage of launching the Russian OS on Huawei devices," the first source told Reuters. Huawei is in talks with the Russian Ministry of Communications, a spokeswoman for Huawei said, but did not provide any other details. Last week, Huawei said the U.S. trade restrictions could cut its smartphone unit's revenue by about $10 billion this year. Russia is discussing the use of Aurora OS on 360,000 Huawei tablets by August 2020.
Nokia engineers, Sailfish OS (Score:5, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken about which Aurora [osnews.com] they are discussing, this Russian OS / Avrora OS is the Russian local semi-independent customization of Sailfish OS [sailfishos.org] - itself tproduced by Jolla, the company formed by the former Nokia engineers that used to work on Maemo/Meego before the whole Microsoft and Stephan Elop crapshit happened upon them.
It's a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, with a QML-based interface running on Wayland and a compatibility layer for Android applications (an LXC-based one, just like Anbox, Collabora's SPURV, etc.)
Nice.
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I read that in the voice of Steve1989's MRE review channel on YouTube.
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I read that in the voice of Steve1989's MRE review channel on YouTube.
Not jazzy enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Niiiice.
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My current phone runs SailfishOS and it's actually a pretty good OS and a definitely a worthy successor of Meego Harmhattan. The gesture features of Meego were so far ahead of the competition that Android and iOS only recently caught up it. Only real gripe that I have is that the newer and much improved Android support is exclusive to the Sony Xpera X2 version and I'm running it on the older Xperia X. It's a real shame that it never picked up any real suppo
Android apps on Sailfi: There might be improvement (Score:2)
Only real gripe that I have is that the newer and much improved Android support is exclusive to the Sony Xpera X2 version and I'm running it on the older Xperia X.
There might be improvements on that front.
The improved Android support hinges on two things:
- having the latest LXC features available (somewhere in the 4.x kernel line, forgot the exact version which is feature-complete -- currently Xperia X uses the older 3.10 kernel)
- having the kernel and driver that support Android/AOSP 8 Oreo (currently, the libhybris abstration used by Sailfish on Xperia X is a "Baseport 6" it runs on the older kernel and driver targetting Android 6 Marshmallow - these are the driver
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From what I gather ( https://together.jolla.com/que... [jolla.com] ) people weren't particularly excited about this survey, especially about the mandatory question about how much they'd pay for a subscription (and there were no "I won't pay" or "0" options).
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Why is Sony so much less horrible when it comes to phones than anything else?
Why is Sony so much less horrible about phones now than they were in their earlier days?
Why did they have to improve right after the era of the Xperia Play? Damn it.
Sony mobile vs Sony entertainment. (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of giant corporate conglomerate were the right hand not only doesn't know what the left hand is doing but each finger seems to be trying to move in its own independent direction in weird contortions.
non-US (Score:4, Informative)
Just to recapitulate:
- the core of the OS (Sailfish OS - now that it has re-absorbed the mer project) is developed in Finland by Jolla.
- the "Aurora OS" customization/localization is done by Rostelecom.
- inside the LXC container runs the freely available and opensource AOSP (the open part of Android, not the proprietary services blob part. Google doesn't need to be involved in this)
- since the latest 3.1 version of Sailfish, it is possible to use microG as a provider for an opensource alternative to the API of Google Play Service - and this one is developed by a German dev on, among other, European funds.
Thus the whole stack is "Trump's ban on US-China collaboration"-friendly: At no point would Huawei to collaborate with Google or any other US-based company potentially affected by a ban.
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It's a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, with a QML-based interface running on Wayland and a compatibility layer for Android applications (an LXC-based one, just like Anbox, Collabora's SPURV, etc.)
It's the year of the Linux desktop... errr cellphone.
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No fragmentation here. ;-)
Russia OS (Score:2)
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I'm very confused.
Intentional obfuscation . . . you are not expect to understand it . . . but just use it.
The finish one. (Score:4, Informative)
source [osnews.com].
(Note: Avrora is the latin-to-cyrillic scripts transliteration, Aurora is the translation of the word. It looks ABPOPA in cyrillic alphabet)
It's the localisation/customization that Rostelecom does [wikipedia.org] of Jolla's Sailfish OS for their own market (what the wikipedia page calls 'Sailfish OS Rus').
It's not currently available on the consumer market, it's only available as business-to-business (on some INOI tablet sold to companies).
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It is a case for the past 50 years, that other countries use to trust the US for these things, now with a set of circumstances the trust in US has been degrading. NSA Spying, Moving services to the Cloud (Hosted elsewhere), now with Heavy Handed Trade wars countries are now having to put in effort to make their own products because the US which was once considered a safe reliable partner, it becoming increasingly risky.
As an American Citizen, I would like to see countries want to buy products from us. Ho
Freedom Notebook (Score:1)
What You can do (Score:1)
Huawei + Russian software (Score:2)
Maybe we could deploy these tablets for electronic voting in the 2020 Presidential election? What could go wrong?
It's Linux (Score:2)
Let's be clear: Aurora is just another Linux distribution. Jolla Sailfish is a Linux distribution. All roads lead to Linux.
My, the hubris of these 2nd tier devs who hack together some crappy messaging-oop api and claim they wrote an OS. Just no. Reminds me of the Javascript monkeys who think they are programming.
Nope (Score:1)
Not just hacked together (Score:2)
My, the hubris of these 2nd tier devs who hack together some crappy messaging-oop api and claim they wrote an OS. Just no.
(Whereas you wrote your own OS from scratch, directly in binary code, perhaps ?)
Sailfish OS goes a tiny bit beyond simply "hacked together". Compared to your garden variety of CentOS/Debian/Suse:
- former Nokia / nowadays Jolla devs have developed ofono [wikipedia.org], a stack for handling telephony (okay, that one runs over dbus, so at least it qualifies for message-passing and for object-oriented API)
- jolla devs also have developed libhybris [wikipedia.org]: a low-level adaptation layer that helps re-using drivers targeting Android (so
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You delude yourself if you think a bunch of libraries is an OS.
So,in Russia Chinese hardware runs a Russian OS... (Score:2)
I'm failing to see the problem here.
Unless the NSA is getting twitchy about not having backdoors into these machines and their data. I shall include the NSA and other TLAs in my prayers, in the inconceivably remote case that I become brain damaged enough to start to pray. Hail
Conspiracy of Dinosaurs (Score:1)
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Except that all the OSs are Linux based. Russia does have that ReactOS as well, which was supposed to be a free version of Windows. But other than that, China had Red Flag Linux, North Korea has Red Star Linux and so on. Where at least the OS is something well understood by most OS engineers
Aside from localization, do these distros do much more? I know that the North Korean one totally perverts the IP protocol by using local addresses as global
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Aurora OS == Sailfish OS RUS (Score:2)
All it would take is for Chinese intelligence to throw a big, strings-free grant at Jolla to build up platform support
Well, TFA is kind of throwing an indirect grant at Jolla:
- Auroras OS is the localization/customization of Sailfish OS for Russia done by Rostelecom. They are licensing it in turn from Jolla, so a bit of the money that Huawei is paying Rostelecom could find their way back to Jolla. And this definitely helps getting the Sailfish platform more widespread.
- Jolla is in the process to start a similar Sailfish China Consortium [jolla.com], so eventually Huawei could get their own localization/customization without Russian i
At Least (Score:2)
I think you are missing the point (Score:2)
Huawei, which is China government by proxy, has no interest in any string-free collaboration with Europe as Europe is just as much their enemy as the NSA.
Just as much? (Score:1)
Yes, because Europe is currently in a massive trade war with them and also messing about with their big successful companies...
China would like nothing more than to drive a tiny wedge between Europe and the US. This would be great for them for that reason alone. Forget all the common sense reasons.
China building on that tech (Score:1)