Video: Nokia Researcher Runs Firefox OS On Raspberry Pi

Both Raspberry Pi and Firefox OS have been getting a lot of attention from TechWeekEurope readers over the past few months. Now, a boff over at troubled mobile giant Nokia has put the two together, running Mozilla’s OS on the budget pocket-sized computer.

Oleg Romashin, a Nokia engineer who has worked on open source OS MeeGo over the last year, has released a video (see below) showing how he made the incomplete, Linux-based Firefox OS work on the Raspberry Pi. Whilst it shows little more of the operating system than the latest batch of photos sent to us from Mozilla, it still looks rather swish. And it proves what clever things people can do on the machine with open source software around.

Oleg has also made the work-in-progress available for download (direct tarball download link only) so anyone can play.

Firefox OS is intended to encourage a degree of hands-on activity, according to Tristan Nitot, founder and president of Mozilla Europe, who said that even native applications in Firefox OS, such as the dialer or address book, are written in HTML5, and users will be able to examine the source code to check it.

“We want to attract hundreds of thousands of web developers [to work] on Firefox OS,” says Nitot.

Earlier this month, TechWeekEurope reported on researchers showing how to run Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich operating system on the Raspberry Pi. Just today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted a clip of a seven-year-old showing off a game he had managed to create on the tiny machine. “Dad Spencer says proudly that Philip had very little help with this. We’re really impressed and very proud too; well done, Philip, and thanks, Dad,” the Foundation said.

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