Plasma Active Infos

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 26 December 2012, Mathieu Calvo wrote:
> Dear Sir/Madam,
> 
> 
> 
> Padways is a french company that develops ambient intelligence systems for
> house livings and industry. These systems uses technologies as touchscreen,
> nfc, sensors, actuators,...
> 
> 
> 
> We have designed our own hardware based on ARM core, we use Android OS most
> of the time and also work on our own embedded linux kernel, from an
> Angstrom one.
> 
> 
> 
> But we just took knowledge of the Plasma Active project, we find that it
> looks very fine and would like to know more about it, in order to use it as
> an alternative of Android for our new customers.

That sounds interesting, and yes, I think Active may be adapt at least for 
projects that require a full linux stack, or a completely customized vertical

> 
> Could you tell me if the kernel is an open source one so that we could
> customize it for our hardware ? If yes do you provide the source for ARM
> based devices, as BeagleBone for example ?

Plasma Active is based on Mer, that is a distribution of all the user space 
for ARM, kernel not included since it needs to be deployed/built in a quite 
different way for each different ARM platform.
then there are "hardware adaptions" projects focused on a particular platform 
that provide the kernel/boot loader and anything else that is necessary to 
boot and run correctly a mer installation on that particular hardware.

I can't answer at the moment about the support of a particular board, but in 
any case if is something not supported at the moment, is usually feasible to 
get it working in a reasonable amount of time, provided the availability of 
drivers.

Unlike Android, Plasma active is based on top of a "normal linux" stack, so if 
the board currently works with other distributions (as i seen in the 
beaglebone example, seems to be present a debian distribution for it) yes, it 
can work with Mer/Plasma Active.

> 
> For Linux HMI programs we use Qt/C++ to develop them, I guess that this
> would also be possible for applications of Plasma Active interfaces ?

yes, Qt/C++ (on top of X11) is the main development platform for Active.

-- 
Marco Martin