We’ve already seen that HP’s Open webOS software can run on a wide range of devices including the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, Asus Transformer Pad tablet, and B&N NOOK Color (although surprisingly I have yet to see anyone port it to run on the HP TouchPad).
But thanks to developer Ping-Husn Chen, you can now try out Open webOS on pretty much any computer. He’s put together a LiveCD/LiveUSB image which is available for download.
Once you’ve downloaded the 112MB file, you have a few options. You can burn the ISO to a CD and boot your computer from that CD to load open webOS.
Or you can use a tool like Unetbootin to create a bootable USB flash drive and try the same thing.
What I did was fire up the free virtualization software VirtualBox so I could load Open webOS in a window without rebooting my computer.
The Live image is based on an Open webOS build for Ubuntu Linux, and it loads much like any other Linux-based operating system. As you may have guessed from the 122MB file size, it’s a pretty light-weight operating system and it loads pretty quickly in VirtualBox. It also feels relatively responsive.
You get a few apps with this build including a web browser, calendar app, memo app, and email app. There’s no access to the HP App Catalog, so downloading and installing third party webOS apps will take a little elbow grease at this point.
But honestly, if you’re not a developer, the only reason to try open webOS right now is to poke around and see what it looks like. It will take a little while before the newly open sourced software is fast and stable enough to really use as a replacement for Android or another OS on your phone, tablet, or other device.
Ping-Husn Chen’s Live distro of open webOS is also a work in progress, so you might want to keep an eye on his site for updates.
via webOS Nation and Geek.com
thanks..I’ll give this a try.
Ad “surprisingly I have yet to see anyone port it to run on the HP TouchPad”: Ports for existing WebOS devices difficult and time-consuming due to the lack of open-source support for “proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel”. While we will inevitably see such ports, it is far easier to initially port to systems with the necessary drivers already available.
Didn’t work for me. Core i3
Yeah, either no graphics at all or just the mouse cursor.