11-08-2024, 08:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-08-2024, 10:36 PM by Kevin Kofler.)
Why Android? The Asteroid OS UI on postmarketOS is the smartwatch equivalent of the GNU/Linux ecosystem you get on the PineNote. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/AsteroidOS (Stock AsteroidOS is libhybris-based, postmarketOS ports it to mainline or close-to-mainline Linux.)
Too bad that the PineTime has nowhere near enough RAM to run a Linux kernel and thus cannot run any of this. So they are targeting old WearOS smartwatches. And last I checked, the postmarketOS and AsteroidOS teams were not recommending the Asteroid OS UI on postmarketOS on any watch model yet, it is still experimental. There is of course the Halium/libhybris-based AsteroidOS that already works on some models if you want to try out something right now. But it uses Android kernels with proprietary driver blobs.
Something I would love to see would be a PineTime 2 or PineTime Pro with sufficient specs to run postmarketOS (with the AsteroidOS UI). Someone on Reddit listed a bunch of SoCs that could be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/...t/kzfkstk/ – e.g., the i.MX 8ULP is cheap, 64-bit ARM, and supports external RAM. (It has 896 KB onboard, which is of course insufficient, though still more than the PineTime's nRF52832 with its 64 KB. But unlike the nRF52832, the i.MX 8ULP accepts LPDDR3/LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM. The smartwatch will need a reasonable amount of that, something like the 3 GB on the PinePhone.)
Too bad that the PineTime has nowhere near enough RAM to run a Linux kernel and thus cannot run any of this. So they are targeting old WearOS smartwatches. And last I checked, the postmarketOS and AsteroidOS teams were not recommending the Asteroid OS UI on postmarketOS on any watch model yet, it is still experimental. There is of course the Halium/libhybris-based AsteroidOS that already works on some models if you want to try out something right now. But it uses Android kernels with proprietary driver blobs.
Something I would love to see would be a PineTime 2 or PineTime Pro with sufficient specs to run postmarketOS (with the AsteroidOS UI). Someone on Reddit listed a bunch of SoCs that could be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/...t/kzfkstk/ – e.g., the i.MX 8ULP is cheap, 64-bit ARM, and supports external RAM. (It has 896 KB onboard, which is of course insufficient, though still more than the PineTime's nRF52832 with its 64 KB. But unlike the nRF52832, the i.MX 8ULP accepts LPDDR3/LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM. The smartwatch will need a reasonable amount of that, something like the 3 GB on the PinePhone.)