Hello people.

I'm an N800 owner and admirer. I use Maemo (Diablo), I tried out Mer, and now I'm very excited about the possibility of running MeeGo on this device. The great thing about the Nokia tablets is this flexibility. I know there are many people here who would like to see Android running on all the tablets (I'm not much into Android myself). And let's not forget that other distros have been used on the tablets, specially Debian and Ubuntu.

The problem is that porting any Linux-based system to the N800 (or any other device) depends first and foremost on making Linux itself, the kernel, support the device. Usually whoever starts making a port of any Linux-based system has to start building a suitable kernel, to only then build the rest of the system, which is the actual work they intended to do.

This need to repeatedly create ad hoc kernels is a big problem. We must put an end to that! We must work for "official" support of the tablets on Linux to make it easier to install new releases of Android, MeeGo and even Maemo and not-yet-devised distros to come.

I'm relatively new to all of this, so I don't know exactly how was the story, when were the drivers released, why it is taking so long... But I do know there are lots of open code out there that work well enough, doesn't seem to have any legal restrictions, and are just waiting for someone to actually submit them to Mr. Torvalds.

The first time I finally built a kernel myself to run on my N800 was because of this thread recently started by tmr:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=49660

he sent a patch for linux-omap to (re-)add support for various things. Termana also has an N810 patch, this one is already against Linus' tree...

Sound in N800 is not supported because the driver has to be updated to the new ALSA SoC (ASoC) standard. I was starting to work on that when I found out that all drivers related to the TSC2301 chip used in N800 were removed from linux-omap exactly one year ago, and are just waiting for someone to push the patches to the Linux tree. It doesn't look like there are great technical impediments to all drivers like there is to the sound driver.

I'm not sure what are the problems with things like the frame buffer, USB and Wi-Fi, but it doesn't seem to be the worst parts looking at this wiki page that Kalle Valo created last year on a summer effort to bring support for the N800 to the mainline kernel tree http://elinux.org/N800

He and a bunch of other nokians worked a lot in the last couple of years to make this happen, but we are still not there, and they are unfortunately not available to continue the effort right now. We are still missing some "final steps", clean up the existing code, organize it the way the Linux people need and submit them.

We need to form a good support basis with all the drivers that already work and can make it to the mainline kernel, to then start working in things like sound (what I intended to work at first). This is a different work from debugging a certain specific driver until it works... It would be better to have a bunch of people, preferably experienced people, working on this together, deciding what will be submitted and doing it.

Who would like to help? I am mainly concerned with the N800, first because it's the one I have, but also because it seems to be the one in worst shape for the moment (doable work needing to be done).

The moment is just right for people interested in MeeGo, because open development for the handset version will begin soon. The first weekly builds to become publicly available should start to show up this month. Stskeeps is working on porting MeeGo to the tablets, but he's focusing on N810 at first, and the truth is the biggest barrier to bring it to the N800 is not related to the distro itself, but to the kernel support, and it's the same problem with Andoid and any other Linux-system.

I don't have much experience with the kernel internals (much less with the process and the policies), but it's not easy to get all of the patches in the mainline kernel, especially if they touch various subsystems.
It's much easier to put the patches in the kernel SRPM, however they'll eventually bit rot.
Sorry, I don't have an answer, but thank you for bringing this issue to the spotlight.

I spent some time seperating out the patches and put them on top of 2.6.35-rc3 for MeeGo on N8x0, described them at http://forum.meego.com/showpost.php?p=4382&postcount=27