The developers of postmarketOS, a distribution for smartphones based on Alpine Linux, Musl and BusyBox, have implemented the ability to use a user interface for smartwatches based on the developments of the AsteroidOS project. The postmarketOS distribution was originally developed for smartphones and provided the ability to use various user interfaces, including KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh and Sxmo. Enthusiasts have been developing postmarketOS ports for the LG G Watch and LG G Watch R smartwatches for several years now, which until now have been limited to the ability to boot in command line mode, since the custom shells for smartphones available in postmarketOS are too heavy and inorganic for such devices.
The solution was to create a port of the Asteroid interface, prepared specifically for smartwatches. The specified interface is developed by the AsteroidOS project and was initially used in combination with the Mer system environment. Asteroid includes a selection of essential smartwatch applications written in Qt 5 using QML and running in an asteroid-launcher shell environment that includes a composite server based on the Wayland protocol.
To interact with equipment, AsteroidOS uses the libhybris layer, which involves the use of drivers from the Android platform, but the prepared port for postmarketOS is adapted to use the standard Linux driver stack. The port was prepared jointly with the developers of the AsteroidOS project. It is noted that the appearance of the Asteroid port in postmarketOS will allow the platform to implement full support for smart watches and begin porting to new devices. Replacing the firmware with postmarketOS could be an interesting solution for continuing the life of old smartwatches, the manufacturer support period for which has already expired.
Let us recall that the goal of the postmarketOS project is to provide the ability to use a GNU/Linux distribution on a smartphone, independent of the life cycle of support for official firmware and not tied to the standard solutions of the main industry players who set the vector of development. The postmarketOS environment is as unified as possible and puts all device-specific components into a separate package; all other packages are identical for all devices and are based on standard Alpine Linux packages, which was chosen as one of the most compact and secure distributions. The Linux kernel is compiled based on the developments of the linux-sunxi project.
Source: opennet.ru