Maru OS: Marrying the Phone and the PC
In case you haven't heard of Preetam D’Souza, he is noted in developer circles for exploring how to bring full-blown PC capabilities to smartphones and mobile devices. Maru OS is an operating system that he has created toward that end, and now this interesting platform has gone open source.
Have you followed Canonical's efforts to marry computing and smartphone capabilities with its Ubuntu Unity phone OS that can dock into a monitor? Maru OS is in a similar space. Maru marries an Android base on a phone and Debian Linux on the desktop.
According to an announcement post:
"There are many reasons that led me to open-source Maru, but a particularly important one is expanding Maru’s device support with the help of the community.
If you’d like to help out with a device port (even just offering to test a new build helps a lot), let the community know on the device port planning list. We currently have a few Nexus, LG, and Motorola builds being planned. If you don’t see your device on there and would like to help with development or testing, please do chip in and we’ll get it added to the list."
"Maru takes a different approach: while the phone-desktop combos above all rely on more or less a single operating system with different user interfaces for different hardware, Maru mixes standard Android on a phone and Debian Linux on the desktop. Though Maru shares storage, processing power, and connective hardware on the phone between the two operating systems, they're still separate pieces of software. The interesting bit is that unlike some other implementations of this idea, the desktop and phone environments run simultaneously on the docked phone and the monitor. A mouse and keyboard need to be paired over Bluetooth to control the desktop environment."
You can find some interesting tweets and reviews about this new open source platform here. We will follow up as development ramps up.