N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Motivation
Since it was announced that maemo.org will receive funding from nokia until the end of 2012, I've set up personal mirror of N8x0 repositories (chinook and diablo). The older repositories were not included.

My inspiration came from the Future of Maemo 5 Fremantle posted by pali.

I can not provide public access to my mirror due to the legal and practical reasons, so I've decided to provide apt-mirror configuration files, so everybody can reproduce the official repositories.

Introduction
Please note that stock apt-mirror 0.48 is unable to parse properly Sources within chinook extras. This is due to the pygtkeditor package which has extra line in it's Files section. In order to address that I've added a single line which skips the line if splitting does not return 3 components (hash size file)

By using the the modified apt-mirror, the replication was successfully finished.

Total size of the repositories is 28GB, which includes i386, armel and sources.

Instructions

1. download modified apt-mirror.
2. download mirror.list.gz.
3. gunzip mirror.list.gz
4. gunzip apt-mirror.gz
5. adjust the base_path within mirror.list to point to path with enough disk space.
6. run ./apt-mirror mirror.list

Additional repositories
The mirror list contains the deb lines for additional repositories from community members. These repositories were commented out. Additional repositories can be added at any time (you have to restart apt-mirror, once you modify configuration).

The additional repositories were obtained from: http://www.gronmayer.com/it/.

Notes
1. You can always stop the process by hitting CTRL+C
2. You can always resume the process by re-running apt-mirror with same parameter

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

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rfu
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Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Is the yearly cost to run maemo.org known and is it possible to get community donations to keep it going? Maybe slap ad banners all over the forums to help out?

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

I think the council is still trying to get a figure from Nemein. Theoretically things should start moving a bit faster once the Foundation is in place, watch this thread.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

The Foundation is in place.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Cool :-)

What's the current handover state with Nokia/Nemein?

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

It's hard because almost every maemo person at Nokia has left, but I think we still have the support from the Nokia side to get it done. Their customer support still gets inquiries about the N900 and they see value in being able to redirect people to a community website operated by Hildon Foundation. The business side also seems to not have objections to extending to us the redistribution license at maemo.org for the parts necessary to maintain the software, but legal hasn't cleared it yet.

Nemein is more uncertain and somewhat unresponsive to maemo.org council up to this point. I am now having Nokia go at them. I think it will get worked on, but the budget is a big obstacle. They have a nice contract with Nokia and I don't see how the finances line up after 12/31/2012.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

meaning that people will be able to hack on the currently closed source bits at some point in the future?!

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

No. This just means we'll be able to continue to use the closed source bits on our own.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

how long did it took to get it all ?

Is it legal to "backup" it on a dropbox service ?

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Probably not, but no one will accuse you for doing you "own personal backup".

Momcilo, lma, once we can sort out all the issues with Nemein and Nokia, we will need administrators for the different services, would you like to be part of the administration group, maybe in charge of N8x0 repositories?

It would also be useful to make backups of firmware images, flasher and SDK, just in case...

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

There goes the resale value on the N8x0's. Meanwhile, I can still use and re-sell my ancient Motorola Droid (my first Android device) and it's STILL getting updates from CyanogenMod (I thought they'd stopped.. but apparently, they've been committing and releasing updates to CM7 even as recently as only a few days ago and every several days.. thanks to increasingly opened Android source code) AND even the closed-source Google apps continue to get updates and run fine.

It's simply boggling the way Nokia took an open operating system and locked it down tighter and tighter with every new Nokia Maemo device and made it nearly impossible to keep the resale value on these devices the way Android managed to for a myriad of devices by many manufacturers. It's infuriating that even mirroring the repositories has to become a crippling legal issue.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Personal backups are absolutely fine if you own a Diablo device, what is not allowed is redistribution of the proprietary bits.

Sure, I've already volunteered for precisely that a while ago.

Until/unless Nokia licences the foundation to host these, it would be wise for everyone to make backups of those.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

What resale value? After all, they are 5-6 year-old devices and you can still find unused ones for sale if you look a bit.

Sure, Android is more open source than Maemo and Google have not set their platform on fire. This isn't the thread to talk about that though ;-)

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

You seem to be making opposing points within the same sentence. What are you saying?

Maybe... Maybe... But this IS a "doomsday" thread, right? It is still relevant point to make that Nokia really has wretchedly crippled and hobbled this "based on open-source" platform and turned it into a horrible legal exercise now. The legal permission to at LEAST distribute closed-source freely may ultimately be the only fix until someone comes along to write an altogether replacement operating system--which we know is unlikely given previous attempts and the closed architecture. It almost begs the question of whether it's even worth it. What a mess.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

I mean that there's not a big market for second-hand units while there are still new ones to be had at low prices. For instance, I got my latest one for £60 last summer, and that was the rare (especially in Europe) WiMAX edition.

Consider the audience ;-) We all agree on that, but re-iterating doesn't help people make personal backups of the bits they're going to need once the repositories go down.

N8x0s are not that closed in that respect, and there are other distributions working fine on them. It's just that there's not enough developer critical mass to polish them (again, the hardware is 6 years old and there are shinier toys available all over the place).

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

I don't want to mirror the repositories but I do want to make sure all the packages I've installed are available in case my device needs to be restored. So here are a couple scripts for anyone who wants to backup their installed packages.

http://maemo.qzx.com/#backup_repos

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Wait, what? What other distributions will run on an N800? You're not referring to stuff like Mer... which ultimately never really ran very well at all even in their heyday when the N8x0's were still the CURRENT devices.

To that end, why isn't there an IMAGE backup like you get with nandroid on the Android devices (thusly eliminating the need for repositories just to get your system back to where it was before you started experimenting)?

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

(Note I said N8x0, most efforts concentrate on the N810 as the keyboard obviously makes things a bit easier). A few efforts I'm aware of include Debian, Gentoo and OpenWRT.

Isn't that (among other things) what bootmenu is for? ;-)

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

And I was thinking Android got the idea from the n900...:D

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Bootmenu makes image backups on Nokia N8x0's? It's been a while but I don't remember it doing that.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

It clones the root filesystem to a card. You can back that up any way you like, or simply clone it more than once on different cards, plus you have the original in the NAND flash to re-clone if you mess the card up.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Running the Post Mirror script ...
(/mnt/apt-src-maemo-diablo/var/postmirror.sh)

/bin/sh: 0: Can't open /mnt/apt-src-maemo-diablo/var/postmirror.sh

Post Mirror script has completed. See above output for any possible errors.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

If someone can send me a comprehensive list of the packages requiring a redistribution license, I will try to get one from Nokia.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

Not comprehensive (I have no idea about Harmattan for instance), but here's what I can think of:

• SDK repository non-free parts (eg http://repository.maemo.org/dists/diablo/sdk/non-free/)
  
• SDK "nokia-binaries" for Bora/Chinook/Diablo (eg http://repository.maemo.org/stable/d...aries_4.1.2.sh and similar).
  
• Firmware images, flashers, SDK rootstraps and nokia-binaries for other releases (http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/)
  
• http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/ (most importantly the non-listable updates trees). The Fremantle equivalent is hosted somewhere else but I don't remember the URL, see /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list on an N900.
  

There's also the non-free parts of extras, but those are generally not (C) Nokia. You can use something like
to extract the maintainer email addresses though.

Re: N8x0 Doomsday repositories
 

For those who have not heard, Nokia has agreed to transfer maemo.org, and all maemo software, tools and trademarks to the Hildon Foundation. The redistribution licenses still have to be identified and worked out.

Last call - please identify in the following thread any Nokia resources needed for Diablo and not residing on any subdomain of maemo.org

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=88031