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.