Possibly.... both, the problem is not closed-sorce drivers, it's the lack of drivers. the current tablets use the OMAP2 prosesor, and unfortunately, there are no "safe" GPU drivers available for us to use. And that reason is mainly because even though Nokia may have drivers available, theas drivers are verry unstable and therefore Nokia feels that the drivers shuld remain closed.

However, acording to Nokia, when the new maemo 5 SDK (OS2009) release comes out thay will be implimenting 3D excelleration, witch is possibly going to be powered by OpenGL 2.0. However, unfortunately we might not be able to use this feature because Nokia's "next gen" tablet will be using a OMAP3 and unfortunately current N8xx devices will be no longer supported by Nokia because of this.


More information about Maemo 5 can be found here.

Is the opengl really needed. since zaurus can run it? Or does the zaurus have video card that supports opengl?

I believe, if i am correct, that the zaurus does support opengl. (i don't have a lot of background knowledge about the zaurus)

Although, i've ben doing a little more research with android and i've found that opengl support is not really needed. It is mostly there for high-end android games and special desktop effects. So this might still be a possiblity, however, we will still need to reverce-enginner the ccurrent android kernel if this is to be possible. Since the current sdk functions quite differently from our current android install.

The Zaurus does not have hardware accelerated OpenGL.

This is what I am trying to work on now. Here is my procedure, maybe someone can correct me if my thinking is incorrect.

First, Android is running off a 2.6.25 kernel. Diablo, as far as I know runs on 2.6.21.

So here are my steps

1) download the diablo kernel source
2) download a stock 2.6.21 kernel
3) apply the OMAP patches to the stock 2.6.21 kernel (available from here: http://www.muru.com/linux/omap/)
4) diff this kernel with the diablo kernel source in order to pick up any additional changes done by Nokia
5) download a stock 2.6.25 kernel and apply the OMAP patches
6) port the patch obtained from step 4 over to the stock 2.6.25 + OMAP patches kernel

Once that is complete we should have a 2.6.25 kernel that can run on the N810.

Now the Android part:

1) diff the stock 2.6.25 kernel with the Android kernel to get the Android changes
2) apply this patch to the kernel obtained above

After that we should have everything we need for the kernel right? Then we just have to work on the harder stuff, like the bootloader, system tools, etc.

the only thing we have to port (i think) is dalvik. dalvik is the java vm of the android environment. who need the android ui? we only need the great apps which will be released to android to run on maemo.

so as I mentioned before: Port dalvik we must!

I don't think that would even be practice because Maemo and Android are built on totally different frameworks. Since Android uses the framebuffer, Maemo could not support eny Android applications because Maemo uses the X window system and X server and doesn't support framebuffer.
Basicly, even if we could get this vm running, we would still have magor problems with synking the app's ui to maemo's ui since maemo doesn't support framebuffer... Unless there is some kind of special interpreter that we could use that converts framebuffer ui instructions into X server instructions.

Presumably, porting dalvik would include creating "a version of Dalvik that draws in an X pane instead of directly to the framebuffer" (which would actually be a useful thing for other platforms, as well).

Once you've ported dalvik, you've got all of the Android apps. That's all you really need, isn't it?

I just updated my post to include that idia right before you posted! LOL

Theoretically, you could get dalvik to write to the framebuffer on the n8x0 too. lcuk does it with his nifty liqbase app, and his code is all open source, so the porter could use his code to do it.