Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

So it looks like the kernel is 2.6.27, so the first thing we need to do is get that kernel (and any associated drivers, such as WiFi) running under Maemo 4.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

kinda makes me want to sell my n810w and wait for the n900 to come out. any guesses on release dates?

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

unfortunately, i am not hopeful, we could get decent hw 3d support.

some chips are designed to be unusable without some secret knowledge. this info you receive only if you licence the technology.

nokia probably wanted to save money and considered 3d support unimportant at the time, so they decided not to licence 3d, imho.

(the same way you could in the past buy multi-processor workstation, with only one cpu working, another cpu(s) where only functional after "upgrade", even if it was only sw upgrade)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I really don't get the negativity... So what if Fremantle won't run on our old N8x0-s? For my beloved n800, Diablo does the job, letting me read ebooks, listen to music, watch videos, rdesktop onto my server to do stuff on a powerful machine, etc. I'll be able to go on doing all those things even if my n800 never ever gets another upgrade. Sure, diablo ain't perfect, but it ain't all that bad either, and the software we already have for it is great.

Do we only want OS-s that run on obsolete hardware? Backwards compatability is nice in theory, but rarely really works out. I want great new hardware, and great new software to run on it, optimized to run on that hardware. If that means
having to eventually stop -upgrading- my old machine, so be it.

Look to the possibilities and the future, not to the past!

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

i feel somewhat cheated since i just bought my n810w. i guess that's what i get for not doing as much research into the device before buying.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Whilst I see your point on one hand I have to say, on the other hand, you've got the benefit of having just tapped into a fairly mature ecosystem of good apps, and can look forward to at least half a year of use before any new hardware comes along. If you'd waited, you'd be without for that time.

The existing software and hardware is -good- and won't get any worse for having a newer, shinier bigger brother. And I think there's going to be a lot of community-support for the n810we for quite some time, seeing as how there's a lot of n8x0-s out there already, in the hands of loving owners.

I've enjoyed every single day with my n800, and if I lost it, I'd buy another one directly, even knowing that the "n900" is on (the far) horizon. It's that good.

Hope you enjoy your new machine as much as I've enjoyed mine, and that the cheated feeling eventually goes away! They're lovely little toys!

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Great news, just right time for my blog superpost =)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Why? Does your n810w do what you want it to do now? Will it stop doing those things when the N900 is released?

I can't count the times I've bought a laptop or television, dvd player, etc, where something better didn't come out (often for the same or less $$$) a month or two later. But what I bought scratched an itch when I bought it and continued to do so for quite a long time.

It's the nature of electronics in general, and computer systems are extremely vulnerable to this "planned obsolescence".

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I am a new user of these nokia tablets.
3 weeks ago i finally bit the bullet and decided to buy the n810. IT cost me almost 500.00 after taxes :eek:
then a week and a half ago they release the wimax edition.:eek: .
I go and i look at the nokia website for the tradeup program and all i can get for my tablet now is 120 american dollars.:eek:

Now i am reading on this board (which by the way is top notch) that the next version of the software will come out but will not be supported by the current tablets hardware.. :eek::mad:
Apart from the fact that i am loving every minute with the tablet, I can't help feeling dupped in everyway.. sure i might have been one of the last ppl reading these forums to purchase a nokia tablet , late , way late in the game but there has to be some understanding from the manufacturer.. If not a promise of future compatibility with the hardware , atleast one hell of a price break on thier "old and soon to be outdated hardware"...

as for the researching of this device .. i exhausted myself learning as much as possible on the features.. but never did i encounter a website , blog, review indicating that this hardware is about to become obsolete..

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I'm really curious about the "license" change....
I got the feeling in the thread about using maemo on the (open)pandora there was not much understanding about my reservations, but it looks like this was picked up after all...
nice...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

iirc, IBM used a similar "trick" with their server products.

wanted to upgrade to more cpus or something? they send over a tech to move a jumper to enable said cpus...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

What about voice support? I really, really hate carrying both a tablet and a phone. A tablet + a headset would be much better...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

That's because your hardware isn't about to become obsolete.

All we're seeing now is a pre-alpha of part of the new software. The new hardware won't be out for ages. Who knows? Six months, nine months, a year? There are going to be loads and loads more N810s sold before the new hardware comes out.

So enjoy your N810!

Regards,
Roger

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Nokia has stated that the first iteration will not have voice calls, but VOIP is always possible. They left it open to voice later, but it was not clear to me whether that will be a hardware or software issue.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

But, it's not obsolete if it still does what you bought it for...:)

Re: "First Maemo 5 SDK release targeting platform developers"
 

I highly doubt your supposition is true.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

No, qole, I do not. :rolleyes: Did the content of my post say I did?

If we're going to revile Nokia for not providing official support, we should at least do it accurately.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

That's because, as others have pointed out: it isn't.

A new device does not make your current one cease to work.

New firmware does not cause your current OS to expire.

Since the N810WE just came out, it and the regular N810 can look forward to at least another year's official support and who-knows-how-much unofficial (community) support.

I have to say I am extremely frustrated with the abuse of the word "obsolete". I wish people would throttle down a bit.

EDIT: the proper term you're looking for is supersede(d). But don't worry; I used to work with documentation professionals who confused the two every day. :D

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Show me where in the alpha SDK source is the code to read N800 battery level or to control charging of battery, , or please, please, please, stop this talk about "community porting Fremantle to N800/N810".

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I've asked about that and was told that it will be possible to provide a binary to return the battery information for use in the Diablo-on-steroids/Fremantle effort.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It looks like the news made it to Engadget, as expected...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Hi,

I have never bought a pda or equivalent thinking I was going to be able to upgrade the OS for the life of the device.

I do know there have been representations of this being available for the IT but at the same time, but as other have said, if it does not happen, your device works as well as it did.

One of my favorite devices is my TH55 Clie and it has been out of production for years and still does what it was designed for today as it did when first bought.

Yes, it would be great to have updates forever but just not practical.

If you dislike the direction of things, speak with your credit card and buy something else.

Enough people do this, it will make statement.

My post here is not to say the arguments in this thread, both sides, are not valid.

I just have a different look on the subject.

David

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I find it soo paradoxical that Maemo community (ok, _some_ people in the community) feel so betrayed when there is some closed code somewhere. Yet In the other end we have Iphonelinux team that has reverse engineered a 100% closed system with no docs, and is already booting Linux on it.

"Bwaa, the wifi driver is closed, we can't maintain a community edition"
"Ok, heres a open wifi driver"
"*crickets*"

Would the same thing happen if charging would suddenly go OSS?

If, in fact you have something like MER or deblet already pretty much working from the already open bits, you are going to be in a much better negotiation position to discuss howto redistribute/open up the remaining legacy stuff.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Okay. Let's bring some sanity into this thread.

1) It's pretty decently understood how to get this information out of whatever chip takes care of it. You can find small utility programs laying about for that.
2) Nokia has actually been quite nice and provided a hald-addon-bme, in a nice seperated deb. Show your model number and you can download it. I used it in Deblet. It plugs in even my own custom compiled HAL, and shows itself as a battery like on any laptop PC.
3) http://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Maemo_variants

From here:

Quote:

This early release comes with an invitation to build variants based on Maemo 5 compatible with existing hardware like the N800 and N810. Maemo SW can't promise commercial quality for such configurations but through maemo.org we are able to collaborate at a community level with technical support, license changes and code.

--
Quote from Peter@Marketing:

"
Actually, we will be supporting this community project. We don't just send an invite and then disappear.

We have various things that are being worked on right now to help the community such as defining license terms in a way that the community can build and use variants. We also made much more components open source than ever previously in order to support this activity. There might be still components that the project need in order to succeed and we will try to make them available too."


Have you any idea how much of a favour Nokia is doing for us right here? They're actually saying, - yes, we're interested in helping you out, yes, we'll look at what (you say) needs to relicensed to accomplish this goal. What we really need is to get organized and get started and start finding out how much we need Nokia to do.

I'm sitting neck deep in hildon building right now, and I'm quite happy with the things Nokia has open sourced just now. A community edition is -definately- in reach. They even did us a huge favour and ported hildon-desktop (diablo UI) to maemo 5 APIs (we owe a guy there a good couple of beers).

They'll even release OHM, as a replacement for closed MCE and DSME. So, things are definately going in the right direction. No, a 100% open source distribution probably isn't possible, without tiny binary blobs that would probably be redistributable/"only usable on tablets.". But that's a quite minor thing compared to what Nokia has released to us.

We'll release some more information on the Mer project and how to participate, soon enough once the dust has settled.

But for now, look at http://picasaweb.google.com/meizirkki/NokiaN810Mer , http://bsd.tspre.org/~stskeeps/mer-loadadv.png , http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Reconstructed , http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint , http://launchpad.net/m-r and
http://jaiku.com/channel/reconstructedPOC - it really is possible to get things running in a sane manner.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

first off, the iphone is the media darling. do anything with it and you have instant status in the tech world.

end result, more interest and more eyeballs.

second, unless nokia brings out a surprise in a ssu, there are some closed source parts that either have a bothersome bug (connectivity applet not seeing saved networks) or cant be tinkered with (browser ui, basically the software giving the tablets a reason to exist in the first place).

funny thing is, had nokia left us with chinook, im not sure as many would be calling foul...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Man, as long as it runs Python & pyGTK, has a nice high-resolution screen, couple-days battery life and fits in my pocket, I don't care if it runs by magical fairies.

I'm keepin' my N800 running Bora, TYVM. I don't see an advantage to any of this other fancy stuff to justify buying a new device, especially if it costs me in battery life.

I'm still shocked my touchscreen still works and has never need recalibration. Palm sure as hell never could manage that one.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Hmm, Diablo is significantly better, why not upgrade?

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Why is the world would it cost you battery life?

You do realize the OMAP3 is significantly more efficient than the OMAP2, right? It consumes almost exactly the same amount of power as an OMAP2 for 2-3 times the performance. Which, of course, means that for any given task you'll be getting to idle 2-3 times more quickly on OMAP3 than when performing that same task on OMAP2, and that means your CPU will be spending significantly more time idle (and, thus, not consuming power).

With ARM CPUs, your goal is to get to idle as quickly as possible (race-to-idle) because when you're at idle, the CPU is off and not consuming power (in fact, the OMAP3 consumes even less power at idle than the OMAP2). So assuming power consumption per clock doesn't rise, you'll get better battery life from a faster CPU that spends more energy for shorter periods of time than a slower CPU that spends less energy for longer.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Let's not open that can of worms, OK? ;)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

This is completely wrong of course. Go read bug 677/2006 where a long-standing (since Mistral at least) critical (crashing the entire machine and corrupting data) bug was fixed practically as soon as the sources became available and made thousands of 770s usable again even after Nokia had officially abandoned them (guess what, you still can't get an official Nokia firmware image containing the fix - it's either Hacker Edition or patch-it-yourself).

Thanks to everyone involved BTW!

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

To bad there is no community fix for wsod...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It's all about the support. Once maemo5 is out, the developers (either from Nokia, Skype, etc or from the maemo community) will stop working to develop/compile/patch for maemo4. Then we have at least one serious problem: security. I don't know what others think, but I would never input serious passwords/credit card numbers in an OS if no one is patching the security holes (BTW, this is why I would never install the vim-7.0 available in the extras repository; not sure whether the security flaw from the official release is patched, but don't want to risk it).

I think why so many people are complaining is because they are doubtful about how much support the maemo community can provide without Nokia's "official backport". Is the community able to deliver a stripped-down (I don't really care much about the new eye-candy UI) version of maemo5 for N810? If not, can the community continue to fix serious problems (especially security related) in Diablo? Only time can tell...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

From my perspective what would make me most happy is to see the applications I use, e.g. GPE family, continue to improve on my N810. I will look to an N810 replacement when it's no longer capable of doing the basics I need from a digital assistant. WiFi meets my mobile networking needs without sending me to the poor house and controling my useage and choices the way cell carriers do.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Despite feeling like I've been somewhat burned with my prior 770/N810 purchases, this is honestly exciting news.

Can't wait to see what the community and Nokia comes up with.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

There are more 4.1 maintenance releases in the pipeline. The Diablo future is quite open at the moment, and most of the possible scenarios include some kind of interaction with / ownership of the Maemo community.

There is no need to hurry. Maemo 5 has still a long way before it becomes the main reference. Let's look at the new code, let's detect the Nokia obstacles in the community way and let's find the most reasonable solutions. Stskeeps, GeneralAntilles and others are already doing this (and they didn't even wait for yesterday's release, btw).

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

1) I know there is such a utility, I wrote it. But we don't even know if BME uses this voltage(?) ADC reading, or reads mAh directly from battery (it does have three terminals).

2) It works with your custom compiled HAL. Will it works with my system using Fremantle HAL and libraries? Will it works with someone else's GCC5 compiled system? If Nokia wants to see a thriving system programming community they need to give us source or information, not binaries.

3) Thanks for this pointer. It clearly shows that there are quite large stumbling blocks left by Nokia for "community system". The binaries necessary for system operations need to be distributable. I don't see any progree in that direction for the three years that this subject is coming up. Is it legal to distribute a Deblet image containing hald-addon-bme?

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

When WSOD happens, the hardware breaks, and there's no fix except for replacing the LCD controller.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

No they don't need to give us source, this would be the ideal, but it probably won't happen due to the hardware being used in other devices. Further down the line, when it's no longer in any current device then perhaps.

In the meantime Nokia have made available the HAL plugin and have said they can and will provide other binaries as needed. Note that the Nokia developers do have other stuff to do (and this support is not official), so I would expect that the major projects such as Mer would have binaries available, but not that everyone can email and say I want a binary for such and such libc/kernel version.

That might not be a problem anyway depending on how the binary is structured, assuming the ARM ABI doens't change again for a while.

Did you read Peter's post earlier, Nokia are changing/have changed the licence agreement to enable the closed parts which are needed to be distributed in custom/community images.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Since we're trying out a 770 port of Mer too, could some of you 770 users send me the collected works of patches for cx3110x for 770? It might come in handy. ( carsten.munk at gmail.com )

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Héhé ... but i ve move to diablo ... specially for the pygtk with a more recent gtk version :)