Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by drdaeman 4726 days ago
Opennes's nice but is it single-person hackable or huge monolithic blob that nobody except the most skilled teams would dare to bite?

My problem with Android is that I miserably failed to hack it alone (I wanted to mess with app permission system and make it work my way). The Behemoth seem to have quite a steep learning curve, so I quickly lost my way in its innards.

However, I was able hack Maemo (except for proprietary parts) on N900 somehow. Stack was loosely coupled, everything's deb-packaged separately, many components are not in-home inventions but are well-known software (Debian base, X11, OpenSSL, DBus, etc.). Sad thing Maemo's practically dead.
3 comments
Yoric 4726 days ago
Well, we have newcomers all the time on both Gecko and Gaia, and they all manage to contribute efficiently.

Here's a short overview of how to get started: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction Not necessarily trivial, but just about everybody manages to get started in a few days at worst.

link
networked 4726 days ago
Despite much of it being proprietary Nokia's S60v3 platform, a Symbian derivative, was/is if not easily hackable (due to the whole certificate business) then at least very easy to write basic apps for. This is thanks to a great Python interpreter [1]. With it I built an RPN scientific calculator with a custom GUI and years later a remote control program for Motion [2] in about an evening each, including (re)learning the API. Thanks to PED [3] I was even able to write small text-based programs on the device itself (though I'd recommend against that if you don't have QWERTY phone; programming on a Nokia N73 was hard enough back in 2007). If you happen to have a phone that runs a variant of Series 60 give Python a go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60. The final 2.0 build sadly broke some networking code. There were very few people complaining, so it didn't get fixed. I suggest using version 1.4.5 instead if you choose to play with it.

[2] http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

[3] https://code.google.com/p/ped-s60/

link
Shorel 4726 days ago
What's your opinion on Ubuntu-phone ?
link
drdaeman 4726 days ago
Haven't tried one (don't have the readily compatible hardware), so can't really tell.

However, from what I've heard, it's Cyanogenmod 10 with Dalvik parts removed and some Ubuntu parts (no X11, Qt5 only GUIs) running in a sort of chroot environment. Doesn't sound much better than any other chrooted GNU install.

link