One of the things I heard loud and clear at the Mozilla Summit 2013 was that getting a device and a current build of Firefox OS is too difficult. I’ve already joined conversations with other Mozillians about making this easier and Mozilla is already making progress on this front — more on that soon. In the mean time, I’m going to walk through the process I heard many describe at the Summit – I’m going to order a ZTE Open from Ebay and take things from there.
Finding the ZTE Open with Firefox OS on Ebay was a cinch. A simple Ebay search for “ZTE Open” put the $801 phone at the top of the list. Visiting the landing page shows that approximately 1,200 people have already ordered this phone.
With my order completed, I’m off to learn what I can about getting a contemporary build of Firefox OS onto the ZTE Open phone.
[1] Be careful not to order the box of 100 phones. It looks very similar to the single phone listing :-)
I’ve got a ZTE Open and I must say getting a “current” build is a struggle. 1.1 doesn’t work at all and 1.2 is mostly working but has a show-stopper. You can see some hints at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=931415 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925502. As I understand it from the forums, this has been ‘escalated’ into the ZTE and Mozilla management chains, but at an hour or so for a build turnaround on my Fedora 19 laptop, this isn’t going to happen without somebody putting some actual dollars behind it.
Update: I do have a working 1.2 build as of 20131101T015500Z! I have no clue why the previous attempts generated buggy images; the build script said everything worked. My scripts are on Github at https://github.com/znmeb/firefox-os-build; the successful build used a Fedora 19 host but the code is supposed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as well.
For building, I found that https://blog.non.co.il/index.php/zte-open-phone-upgrading-to-firefoxos-1-1-how-to/ is a good pointer, FYI.
@znmeb, that’s great! Thanks for the pointer.
@Kairo, that looks awesome. Thank you!!
Mozilla’s such an awesome community. I love how helpful people are :)
[…] the first of my “onboarding” series, I ordered my ZTE Open phone. I received the phone and discovered that it’s one of the […]
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