Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

See tl;dr section below.

Here's the thing. Disregarding the caveats of some of the hardware, like the awkward design idea of the placement of the SIM card, held by the battery, and the fact that the SD card slot can only be accessed from removing the panel; and the fact that the Micro-USB port and kickstand magnets, and the kickstand itself, sometimes need a fix; and that the CPU has a potential to have a decreased life at 1.0Ghz; and the fact that the battery can only last up to 5 hours this way (with an ondemand governor), it all sucks. But you know what? It can run GNU/Linux.

You see, the only reason I bought my N900 was for the software capabilities. And now that it's 2012 and Android bloatware is taking over people's minds like iOS. You admit it, too.

If I could, I would buy something like the Galaxy Note II, but only if it could run GNU/Linux or other free software on it on the ARM CPU architecture, and the newer Tegra chips. The fact that the portable devices have a highly controlled market that is separate from people's rights to freedom of choice and software freedom is completely wrong, and it must be corrected. Anyway,
I was looking for the near perfect device with near perfect functionality, but because of the deficits, I am not seeing it in this device. I can only create a new one in my mind.

Well, enough about that. I'm going to discuss my real problems with Maemo 5. My phone feels incredibly unstable with this software after playing around with it. I have no idea if I have been accidentally installing software from extras-devel. Even though I have set the pin-priority, it seems like I have been using extras-devel packages, more so. The testing CSSU may also be causing problems. I think, since I use this phone for many reasons, I am sticking with the stable CSSU...

And my other problem with Maemo 5 is that is still is not 100% free and open source, Libre software. I would expect after 4 years of the N900's release that the Maemo community would be happily hacking away at this device, making a fully functional, alternative OS, and that at least some people outside of Nokia, would know the ends and outs of it. But instead I find a community that now feels abandonment for it, or hasn't worked hard enough towards it, and I can only fear for that.

So after trying to remove proprietary software from Maemo, it seems to be more unstable. It crashes and turns off after a couple hours, my Mobile signal now has to be activated every time I boot it up, charging problems happen, there's really annoying temporary freezes and slowdowns, that I never get with Android, and many other minor irks, like not figuring out to remap the volume buttons in portrait mode... Some of these might just be third-party software problems, but it's annoying, and I can't figure it out.

I really hate how Maemo has a lack of flexability. It can easily be broken, and you have many notices that say "WARNIGN THIS SIHT CAN BREAK YOU DEVICE FOOL!!" blah, blah, blah. I never see this warning/disclamer sh*t on the OpenMoko Wiki. Come on, guys.

Another example is if you change one config file, the whole thing "breaks", and you can't boot up anymore. Hello? This is why GRUB Rescue and Busybox was invented. Why doesn't the N900 use that during the boot process? What can't the N900 use a proper init process so I can see what's going on? And it's annoying to have to keep backing up with backupmenu because it takes a long time.

Maybe I'm complaining too much, but the amount of problems has started to pile up, and the low battery life really stresses me out every day that I go out with my N900. And I feel that if I just replace the battery again, it might just last 5 hours again. I don't carry a spare battery because I don't drive or anything, I bike and take the transit, I don't have the time or privacy to take off the back cover like a fool, unless the OS freezes up, which, consequentially, happened more with Android. :D

When I boot kernel-power from Multiboot, it always have to boot it twice sometimes. And then I still haven't figured out how to use CPU frequency scaling without an app, and have ACPI events trigger with the screen locked.

Here's another huge, huge problem. Nokia thinks that they can F--- up the device by putting in non-standard GNU software replacements specifically designed for the N900, which breaks most compilation for real GNU/Linux software, forcing people to use a SDK and be compatible with the proprietary software in order to be able to compile "Apps", basically. Why can't I just have a real GNU/Linux environment with Xorg/Wayland and the Enlightenment GUI, or something, with a free software "app dock" thing, which already has preconfigured button and font sizes, and stuff. And have it properly work with GNU/Linux software, like Plasma Active. Why do we need an SDK like Android has?

All of the caveats are hopefully what the OpenMoko device is good at, but I don't own one yet, and it still has shittier hardware than the N900. Life really sucks when you know too much, and you know that certain things do not exist that you really want.

tl;dr section:

Okay, so I want to replace Maemo 5. I barely use it for phone calls, but it would be nice. (And, gee... wouldn't it be nice if most companies also stopped using the traditional telephone, SMS, and snail-mail in favor of VoIP services, IM, IRC and E-Mail? Whatever.)

I want to know if these operating systems are completely usable, and have the phone, SMS, FM Radio, IR transmitter, HW keyboard, etc... all working.

• Mer/Nemo
• Plasma Active
• SHR
• MeeGo
• Debian for ARM+Ofono+firmware
• Something else?

I'm really interested in using Mer/Nemo and SHR, since they seem to be up to date and rely mostly on free software.

P.S: I have also installed NITDroid on another partition already. And I am not worried if the above OSes need to use proprietary firmware to enable most of the functionality on the N900, I am willing to deal with that.

Well, I think that according to the links below, Debian team hasn't had much progress on getting Debian to work fully on the N900 (yes, I already know about Easy Debian Chroot, but I'm talking about booting into native Debian.)

http://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
http://wiki.debian.org/pkg-n900

Any suggestions for a new OS?

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

No suggestion for your main question, but on a side note, please be aware you can indeed run gnu-linux (in a chroot) on the Galaxy Note: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1585009
It works well.

EDIT: of course you know you can do the same on your n900 thanks to Qole. Or you didn't? You can have your beloved Debian in all its glory, and it's deadly easy to install. Try it :) http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=34550

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

**cough*android*cough*worthless vnc hack*cough*cough**

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

vi_, it's not X, OK, it's X in VNC, on localhost. But it's not a problem if you want to hack your way in coding or in applications that don't need astounding graphic performances.

See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TXVS...2&feature=plcp
and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa2tsu1B_0o

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Well it is a chroot. And I can already do that with Easy Debian on Maemo, and there's also Linux Installer for Android along with your post. The problem with a chroot is that it still adds overhead, unliek running it natively, so it's still slowed down. It's almost like running a VM, except it's more exposed to the userspace area, if that makes sense...

Anyway, the problem I was gawking at, was that there is still no good way to run GNU/Linux code natively and safely on an Android device with everything working. Let's forget the chroot and VNC methods.

P.S: Wow, last time I looked at the XDA Develoeprs website, it didn't look as shitty before.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Did you have a run at this? https://elektranox.org/n900/index.html
(see also http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ghlight=debian)

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

1. You have tried to remove all proprietory software.
2. You overclock to 1GHz and beyond.
3. You only have a 5 hour battery life.
4. You suffer extreme instability.
5. You have loaded your phone up with nitroid and god knows what else.

This sounds like a self inflicted wound. You have borken your n900 software. Stop blaiming the n900 and re-flash your device.

You hate flexibility. You mad? This is the MOST flexible device available. Flexibility is the reason you have busted your N900 so well and it still runs.

Your complainig about warning messages that indicate to the user rough/exprimental stuff is ahead? See your symptoms above.

It does use init. How do you think backupmenu works? Add KP and you can even have a pre-init framebuffer console to fix whatever your deranged mind decided to remove last.

You are upset about the SIM being covered by the battery? find me a device that allows you to yank the sim while powered up... You are distressed by the fact you have to take the back off to get the mmc? The mmc HAS to be behind some kind of door, otherwise people would be yanking it out without unmounting it! On the few droids I have used, you could not even change the mmc withput rebooting the phone!

The N900 is not without it's flaws however the problems you have listed above are of your own creation.

2/10 - Trollage not recommended.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Yes, granted. I deserve some of that criticism.

I just had a realization though. I can't remove Maemo if I rely on it for Multiboot, and U-Boot and Backup menu... So I pretty much just have to use another partition, probably on an SD card, for a new OS, unless I can use the flashing tool to reflash just u-boot, Multiboot or some other bootmenu, a kernel, and Backupmenu, without Maemo, which doesn't sound very possible.

For some reason, I think I don't have U-Boot installed anymore since it only shows the white Nokia logo when booting up, but it just used to flash really quickly and show U-Boot, but I think something uninstalled it.... probably Multiboot.

Have you ever had an OpenMoko device and can confirm this?

How do you activate this?

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Yep.

Que?

And here we come to the point of all your problems.
Installing stuff from devel without knowing about the consequences!
Reflash your device and stay with extras repository, and you will have an open (mostly) free and stable device.

Read forums, especially recovery console and kernel-power thread.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Install Arch or Debian, cross-compile the 2.6.37 kernel for ARMv7 softfp, grab the GLES drivers and use your favorite DE of choice.

And make sure to install U-boot with that kernel.

Your device won't be as useful as a phone (Text messaging kinda works, if you can find a suitable client) and battery life will suffer slightly (IIRC some PM stuff on Nemo isn't as worked on as Fremantle's), but it will be quite open (with the exception of the ImgTec SGX drivers) and as snappy, if not snappier than Maemo.

(P.S.: Fremantle Hildon-Desktop works quite crappily when built and used on its' own. Hopefully some people can find time and make it polished as it is on Fremantle.)

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

so, if you want true gnu/linux on your android phone, than this is for you:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1617684
im running it myself on my motorola atrix 4g. It runs the gentoo OS natively (you can ssh onto it from your android os, or if you put it into HDMI you get native X with hw acceleration on your tv/monitor, together with a bt mouse and kb you have a so to say fully functional linux computer - rather slow, but it has all). Sadly enough, this is for now the only phone that has this working fully (there are ports for the motorola razr, using the webtop than chrooting into gentoo, but thats just not it). So if you have great knowledge of linux, study how this is made on the atrix and try porting it to the one X/galaxy s3 , which have was superior SoCs as compared to the atrixs tegra2. There is one more thing by canonical called ubuntu on android, which runs it natively too, but sadly they are keeping it closed source...

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

I'm not tired of Maemo, I'm tired of N900.
I just wanna see Maemo on a better device before I die.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Same here! I'd love Maemo5 on a 7 or 10 inch tablet, with attachable keyboard. How sweet would that be? Give it a dual-core 1.2ghz processor with 2GB of ram and it'd be the ultimate device.

Though (and some may totally disagree with this) but I want a resistive touch screen that has multitouch. Yes they do have them, and yes resistive is better for drawing, etc. That would be my dream setup. At least until the multitouch stuff works under Gnome-shell, then I could probably just go with a pure Linux tablet with that. After all, a lot of the design of it was copied from Maemo 5.

slaapliedje

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

I agree to the last two comments about wishing for Maemo on a better device and a fast tablet would be great.

I would be happy with a Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Maemo

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

I've searched everywhere, but I have to improvise now because I cannot figure out what to do about this.

I have decided to use the 0xFFFF flasher since it is free software, but there are barely any detailed instructions for flashing images to the N900 eMMC and rootfs, step by step. It seems to have support for most of the functions of flasher-3.5, except coldflash. And I can always use flasher-3.5 to "debrick" if I need to...

What I am trying to do is learn about this zImage and Fiasco format business. I am trying out SHR-Core, because the page here:

http://elektranox.org/n900/kernel/uboot.html

I followed these instructions, but I am stuck on the make process. I have checkedout, patched and ran the make nokia_rx51_config command. But when I type make I get this error:

Anyway, I like the bit of criticism: "The Maemo guys ****ed up again." Haha! But I forgive you guys. :rolleyes:

While I was playing around, thanks to the Maemo and FSO Wiki, I was able to learn about R&D mode, and I enabled that along with some flags. Now I don't have to hold down the power button anymore, yay.

I'm on a leg now, deciding if I want to try SHR or FSO (Debian) on the N900. I will probably try SHR first and possibly figure out how to dual-boot the Debian OS later.

I want to replace the bootloader (is it stored in rootfs or NAND?) with Das U-Boot, firstly, then I want it to boot a kernel that works for both FSO and SHR. Otherwise, I can use a zImage (which is used with kexec, right?) and boot up a custom kernel for each OS, stored in its own "image" (I think that's how this works).

My question is, how do I do this to eMMC and rootfs? Not to the SD Card. Can I just download a .jffs2 file from SHR-Core and flash that? Or is this process more complex as I expect it to be?

I'm guessing Maemo guys won't help me anymore on this endeavour?

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

umm.. keep googling and reading?
maybe look at fdisk'ing your NAND to keep maemo.
then make entries into u-boot (maemo rootfs).. same as booting off micro SD??

i'm not much of a linux guru tho.

Edit: you wont be able to use your M900 as a phone while doing all this??

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

I remember... win31 wasn't too bad... you can try if you want.

The concept is that, if you want, you can choose.

.....or choose another device. ;)

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

IIRC, i was reading somewhere around here strongly discouraging activation of r&d mode ...

maemo community is here and they help, but all that you are asking has probably been answered ...

so please do some googling related to debian/flashing/booting/kp etc on site:talk.maemo.org and grab some bottles of your fav caffeinated drink and give the readings some 48 hours and i'm pretty sure you'll be a happy visitior.

but first !!!!! http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware plz.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

lol. i'm not tired of maemo and certainly not tired of n900. But yes it would be lovely to see maemo running on a much more powerful hw, something like multiple cores and lots of ram.

not a bad thing to wish for before one dies hehe.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

If you want to boot off the emmc take a look at how Meego CE/nemo can do it:
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Install/EMMC

NB. their findings indicated it would be better (faster) to use an SD card.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Yes, I remember reading that. But my car I think is only Class 4 or 6. I haven't tested the speed, yet.

Maybe I can partition the SD card, and then put /usr and /home, or anything else that can be loaded in to RAM, on the eMMC, and partition the SD card for swap, etc, root, var and temp. This is why I would like to use another OS besides Maemo, because Maemo can't easily be this flexable.

You may have heard one person's opinion. I think it can either save battery (by disabling watchdog) or shorten battery life (by enabling terminals) depending on how you use it. If you or anyone know(s) any details of (the) side effects of R&D, and how to treat them, please let me know in detail.

No, that's not necessarily going to be true. I think FSO, SHR and Nitdroid, as an example, all have GPRS/GSM/HSDPA+ and whatever all working. Some of these may have problems with the camera and GPS, but FSO (and maybe SHR) says that it doesn't. I can always use ofono, and that runs in the terminal, but I don't know if I can make phone calls with a GUI. Maybe I can firgure out how to make one in Ruby or Python if nothing exists for that.

Unfortunately, I think all of these OSes have problems with voice. Even though they can make the calls, there's no voice output on the recieving end, which sucks. But hey, maybe someone, even myself, can write the firmware needed to fix that problem.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Funny. I have the opposite feeling. I find the N900 and excellent piece of hardware. Maemo5 is, IMHO, not on par.

But if you want to use the N900 fully (i.e. also as a phone), we're pretty much stuck with Maemo. My current efforts (though very slow due to lack of time) is to try to "Linuxify"[*] Maemo as much as I can, while keeping the useful bits (e.g. being able to make a call).
[*] In the good sense of the word. Like Linux about 10 years ago or so. Before it became a bad copy of Windows and MacOS.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Really? I would not like to swap my linux kernel with the one from 10 years ago. Much better hardware support nowadays , faster startup because of systemd in my distro and so on.

Or are you refrerring to Linux desktop environments? I like my shiny KDE 4 desktop environment, and don't care some parts may look somewhat like Windows. But you can pick your own most basic non Windows/Mac-like desktop environment.

Somehow people tend to think things where better in the old days, but memories are selective. The (ICT) world changes at an increasing speed, if you like it or not. It would be better if people just use the stuff of their liking and complained less about components they (think they) do not like, just because it is different then what they are used to.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

@ade,

Not the kernel. But things like upstart, hal, pulseaudio, etc.

I understand that a desktop Linux system needs to be "flexible" so as to work with various hardware components, configurations, etc. But Maemo5 only exists for a fixed piece of hardware, the N900.

So I don't see why we need abstraction layers everywhere. Plus then Nokia added lots of things that in my opinion are/were not necessary, such as ohmd and bme.

My goal is to "streamline" Maemo5 under the N900 so that things work, but without that extra overhead. Even if there's no gain in performance or memory footprint or anything, just for the cleanness of it :)

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Get a cross compiler with the tuple arm-linux-, or simply build it on-device using Easy-Debian.

The N900 already sort-of-works without OHMD and BME. Power management is awful though (you may want to try newer, 3.x series kernels to get slightly better PM)

If I were you, I'd build a buildmachine VM with armhf-linux- cross-compilers on the latest GCC, be able to compile 2.6.37 from scratch, and start a rootfs from a distro with lots of compiled packages for armhf (see: Debian and Ubuntu)

The Mer 2.6.37 kernel for the N900 works well enough. GTK2 is old but still works, and you could work on fixing up Hildon for newer GTK2 versions (refer to Cordia and CSSU, I guess), and throw it up on a repo.

Telephony works via Ofono while Bluetooth and WiFi work via standard Linux stuff. Audio to the loudspeakers should work via standard ALSA.

Use the lock slide as a shortcut to turn off the screen. This may be complicated, and require some sort of DBus integration or a custom daemon. This should give you a few extra hours of battery life.

I guess further down the line, you can give yourself more freedom by building packages specifically for the N900 using some sort of buildmachine.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Could you go into details of what you have already done, and what you have planned to do, I'm also kinda interested.


Anyways, I was reborn as a Linux user sometime in 1998 when my last Amiga broke. Times were hard but times were good too. I too think that distributions have gone too far to please everyone, and kinda miss the days when you actually had to know what you were doing (yeah, right :D) and had to do some work to get your system up and going. As a reward you got os fully customized to and by yourself and the greatest feeling you've accomplished something. Luckily this is still possible, especially with great projects like arch linux and gentoo. That said, I am KDE user myself, I dont have anything against modern, windowsy way of utilising hardware when there is horsepower to do that. I love N900 as a hardware and too think Maemo needs some serious work to catch up, and "streamlining" it and in the same time getting rid of the closed parts should be one one goal in our honoring of the both device and os it comes with.

Sorry if this was too offtopic.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

What exactly is your purpose and goal? To prove a point? Or to have a working device?

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

Just like I can purchase a windows pc and easily replace/dualboot/coexist with say, ubuntu, I would love to see the day you can do the same with your favorite linux flavor on a slider of any make.

Re: Tired of Maemo. Want to use another OS.
 

the messages are pretty clear. what exactly don't you understand?