Enthusiasm for HP’s (Palm) webOS remains quite high, even if the industry heavyweight is no longer actively promoting the open source OS.
Indeed, an early build of Open webOS 1.0 was recently spotted running on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, while a talented dev by the name of Steven Troughton-Smith is coding a port of Open webOS for the popular Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet.
In addition, the folks at Phoenix Devices are working on a utility that allows users to launch webOS as an app from an Android device. And now a developer by the name of Ping-Husn Chen has put together a LiveCD/LiveUSB image of an unofficial Open webOS Live distro, which is based on the desktop build and mkxpud for Ubuntu 12.04.
As Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, users have a few options after downloading the 112MB file.
“You can burn the ISO to a CD and boot your computer from that CD to load open webOS,” he explained. “Or you can use a tool like Unetbootin to create a bootable USB flash drive and try the same thing. What I did was fire up the free virtualization software VirtualBox so I could load Open webOS in a window without rebooting my computer.”
According to Linder, the Live image loads much like any other Linux-based operating system. The OS is also packaged with a number of basic apps, including a web browser, calendar memo and email client.
Unfortunately, there still isn’t access to the HP App Catalog, so downloading and installing third party webOS apps will likely take a little work at this point in time.
