Oh good heavens, would you look at the time? :acab-2:
In my last post I showed off my PinePhone running Linux, but since I'm a full sicko, I'm going to show off my Linux watch. Pictured is an Asus Zenwatch 2, running a nightly build of AsteroidOS .
What is AsteroidOS? ⌚
It's a full Linux distro for wearable computers. It's still heavily under development, and there's not much in the way of apps or features yet but it has the basic apps you would expect a smart watch to have (music player, calculator, weather app, calendar) along with some additional fun features for those that love *nix based operating systems like a dropbear ssh server and the full busybox coreutils suite. There's about a dozen watch models supported in various states of working from just booting the OS to having hardware feature parity, all older Android based devices. The build for my watch is fairly complete, missing only WLAN access requiring me to SSH over the watch's USB cable rather than the local network.
On watches with Bluetooth connectivity you can connect it to your Android (or even Ubuntu Touch!) phone via a dedicated application, similar to the Galaxy Wear or WearOS applications. This can be used to send notifications from the phone to the device, sync time and weather, grab screenshots, and sound an alarm on the watch if it's still connected but you can't remember where you put it down.
That's cool, but what else can it do?
Like most computers, just getting Linux on it is the start and not the end. While there's not many apps at the moment, more work is being done to turn this into a full free software wearable computer. A hilarious proof of concept from a few months ago is an AsteroidOS developer had put a Nintendo DS emulator onto the watch, and used it with a PS4 controller paired to the watch to play a round of Mario Kart. :sicko-jpeg:
the pinephone guys are working on a smartwatch too, if you're interested. i'm thinking about getting one to replace my pebble when that finally kicks the bucket, though the pinetime is still in very early stages and there doesn't seem to be a complete "smartwatch"y firmware yet.
I love the Pine64 team. I've been thinking of getting one and putting postmarketOS on it since the price is right, but I also have a feeling it'll sit on a shelf or in a drawer since most of the available firmware for it is in really really early stages of development, lol.
i'm not sure if you could run pmOS on a pinetime but if you can that's really cool. i hope to get a pinephone to mess around with soon, if calls and sms work on it i might even make it my main phone.
I must've misremembered, checked the pmOS wiki and it doesn't appear to be a supported device, yet at least. Must've mixed it up with some of their other smartwatch support. Still want to get one!
If you can get a pinephone, it's fun to play around with! Not sure how well it will be as a main phone, haven't gotten a sim card for mine yet to really test it out, but for a device to hack around on it's great. Supposedly calls and SMS work now from what I've been keeping up on for pmOS and mobian development.