Maru, the Debian for Android Project, Goes Open Source

jeremy · 02-12-2016, 12:19 PM

Quote:

Last Thursday I announced Maru, software that turns your smartphone into a PC. It got a lot more attention than I was expecting, so I want to clarify things a bit.

It all started in 2013, when I was excitedly watching the unveiling of the Galaxy S4 and its octa-core processor from my dorm room. I was streaming the event on my expensive dual-core laptop, not quite believing that a phone could pack that kind of hardware. By the end of the same year, 64-bit ARM chips were starting to ship. I started to think that the term “smartphone” was really a misnomer; the devices that we carry around in our pockets are powerful computers that can get serious work done–they’re not just smarter phones. Yet we were only using a fraction of that power. Imagine tapping into that potential and carrying a single device that would adapt itself to any screen. That vision drove me to begin R&D on a proof-of-concept in my spare time, and in 2015 I actively started development on what would soon become Maru.

Fast-forward a year (and several seemingly insurmountable obstacles) later, and I was finally ready to release a beta. I thought I’d set up a nice website with a sign-up list and see if anyone was interested in trying it out. I thought maybe I’d get a couple early enthusiasts willing to give it a shot.

Instead, I got a couple thousand.

[....]

With that spirit in mind, I’m open sourcing Maru. Setting up a large-ish open source project is new to me so please be patient. There’s a decent amount of work that needs to be done to document and automate things so people can easily get started with the code. A lot of stuff on the website will be changing too. I’ll be posting frequent updates as this progresses.

While this goes on, new development for Maru will be on pause. I’ll go ahead and open up the beta downloads for a couple of days for everyone who has already signed up–you guys deserve to try out Maru–but I suspect that Maru will change a lot in this process so you may want to hold off until the dust settles.

I think that together we’ll be able to make Maru better than ever. We can get Maru on more devices, have more thorough testing, and benefit from all the great ideas within the community. What started out as a personal quest quickly became a shared vision by everyone who felt a spark of excitement at Maru’s promise. And that promise extends far beyond the developer community. Imagine if we can give people who don’t have access to a PC a similar experience on their low-cost smartphones. I think Maru can have a serious impact here, and I am very keen on hearing from anyone who can help with this.

Official Blog Post...

Have any LQ members tried Maru? Do any plan to?

--jeremy

schneidz · 02-12-2016, 01:16 PM

i signed up for the waiting list for the beta. they dont exactly explain how to connect a nexus-5 to an hdmi display since the nexuses dont have mhl (the galaxies do however).

i havent made it very far with this trial:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-a-4175563139/