Just a quick heads up, I've gotten OpenWRT trunk building and booting on the Nokia N810. This includes openbox and qt4.8, along with a Linux 3.3.8 kernel. It's not ready for anyone but fellow hackers, but it's heartening to see some relatively modern SW versions coming to life on this wonderful old platform!

(This work started from the original efforts of a very interesting guy named Michael Buesch.)

Regards,
Andy Valencia

Interesting!

Just what i was thinking about doing with my dead touchscreen n810, but hack it into an old d-link router case, and attach the antenna.

Does it do anything of use? AP, bridge, repeater, ftp, usb hosting, etc?

Or is it just a proof of concept?

Curious none the less, since i'm making an openwrt super router out of a a350 foxconn mini itx board, and a DNXA-116 pcie wireless n card, along with a 2w signal amp and would like to get a taste of openwrt.

Gonna blast wifi a few miles out, and figure out some kind of lipo powered counterpart smallish router, to fit in a backpack. Just for the fun of seeing if i can get a couple mile los connection to my home net. Add a solar panel and you can get a little mesh going, assuming you live in as small of a town as i do. Also need a n setup for my nook color in the mail, running a rosewill rnx-g4 with ddwrt atm, and while its nice, my brother locked it up a few times with vuze while visiting. Too many packets through an overpowered wifi radio me thinks.

Plus i got a brother that live in the woods (with laptops/ipods ) who might like to be able to pull wifi from a few miles away. If you can use the n810 as a client bridge, then with an appropriate directional antenna/amp setup, it would be a cool little present for him.

Just some crazy ideas i've had today......

It's just a plain old Linux host on the local AP, so whatever you could do with a Linux box with screen, keyboard, Wifi, and USB port should be possible here.

Could you please share your diffs?

I've tried the same about a month ago and, after a lot of minor modifications to make the packages compile (like eg replacing G_CONST_RETURN with const), I've got it to load and run on the device, but only in console mode.

Also, I wasn't able to get neither the wlan or kexec to work,
and most worryingly, there seems to be no support for charging/monitoring the battery.

Thanks

I believe they're here.

It's been a while, but 900-n810-battery-management.patch seemed to work fine for charging last time I tried it.

I am really interested in its function to work as a wifi ap or extender. Would it be possible? Please keep working on it guys, n810 is not dead yet. I really want to turn it into something, but I have been away from the scene for a while and I don't know if there is any progress towards an anternate os with more apps, etc.

If you look on their defect system for submissions from "vandyswa" you'll see all the patches I had to make to get things working.

I built the kernel console rig described by Michael Buesch and have gotten a kernel under kgdb. But the watchdog pops about 40 seconds later and turns off the unit! So I either need to figure out how to disable the watchdog in the first place, or else integrate a watchdog update hook into Linux's touch_nmi_watchdog().

So that's what I'm up to when I find the time...

Andy

what about GPU support ? any progress so far on PVR ?

There is no drivers/gpu/pvr/ in OpenWRT's 3.3.8 tree. If somebody has that stuff working on the n810, I haven't heard about it, and there's no sign of it in the kernel tree. The last work I saw was back in 2009, and it was very unstable.

I'll go ahead and look in my crystal ball and predict that there will never be usable powervr support on the n810. What little time I have for the OpenWRT port is focused on the basics: stable kgdb, WiFi, and power management. It'd be great if some intrepid hacker would take up the powervr support again, but it's a rough proposition, what with open source kernel talking to sorta working binary blobs in user space. And I don't think all the retrace hooks ever got worked out. And at this point there's nobody who might help at either TI or Nokia.

Andy