Thread: Maemo 6 / Harmattan on N900?
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javispedro is offline javispedro
2009-10-10 , 19:30
Posts: 2,355 | Thanked: 5,249 times | Joined on Jan 2009 @ Barcelona
#65
Originally Posted by DaveP1 View Post
Nonsense. I have a computer that doesn't have the graphics chip required to run Windows Vista Aero and it's fancy transparent windows crap. But I can still install and run the rest of Vista.
And you can build most of Fremantle with sw rendering and install it on your N8x0, but it will be dead slow. The reason you cannot install the actual N900 binaries is explained below.

Originally Posted by DaveP1 View Post
With computers the issue is generally backward compatibility, not forward compatibility. Assuming you have the basic capacity (sufficient disk space to hold the OS, sufficient RAM to load the OS, and sufficient CPU to run the OS) the hardware, regardless of how old it is, puts constraints on the OS but it doesn't prevent the OS from running. OTOH, trying to run an old OS on new equipment often means that the equipment isn't recognized because the drivers for components do not exist in the new OS.

Unlike computers, with phones you program to your hardware. Maemo 5 and 6 reflect the smartphone nature of the N900 and its successor.
I see only one difference: hardware configuration is mostly specified at build time instead of run time, because embedded platforms do not have a common configuration you can at least use to boot. But that does not prevent you from swapping out N900 and N810 kernels.

Originally Posted by DaveP1 View Post
It's unfortunate that I would have a better chance of running the latest Ubuntu on a 20 year old 386 than running Maemo 6 on a two year old N810.
Good luck trying to run 586 binaries on a 386. Same as trying to run cortex-a8 binaries in a arm11.
Last edited by javispedro; 2009-10-10 at 19:35.
 

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