Project Halium hopes to bring back Linux on mobile
The Android, Linux-based Operating System may dominate the smartphone world but there are many Linux users who yearn to have a mobile OS that has the same desktop Linux experience to use Linux tools and utilities.
Many open source companies have failed to finish that task like Firefox OS, Sailfish OS and even Canonical. But the developed code has been taken up by some people to create alternative to Android and iOS. But the downfall of this task is that there are too many mobile projects that are working towards the same goal but is isolated from each other.
To bring all these open source projects under a single roof brings the inception of Project Halium, done by a group of open source developers. Halium will act as a common ground to these open source mobile projects.
“ Currently distributions like AsteroidOS, LuneOS, Mer, Plasma Mobile, SailfishOS, and Ubuntu Touch have one thing in common that they use the libhybris to interact with the android binary blobs and also run various android daemons using different methods. And there is lot of fragmentation on how this task is handled even though these parts don’ t need to be different as their essential goal is to make use of android binary blobs,” said Bhushan Shah, one of the project founders.
The core of the Halium framework is Linux kernel, Android HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and libhybris. The base of the Halium is the same, but different project can use their own top layer to offer different experience for its users.
Simply put, Halium is not a mobile distribution but rather a building block that others can put together to create their own distribution.
The first goal of Halium is to create a working prototype using Google Nexus 5. If this project is successful, it may have a shot of creating a OS on par with Android and iOS.
The developers are aiming to create a better way for non-Android GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, Plasma Mobile, and others to make progress in the context of porting an OS to Android hardware.