[maemo-community] [maemo-community] Opening the Flasher

[From: pancake]

Hello Quim!

It sounds quite strange to me to see that Nokia aims to free their
flasher now.. after two years having a public and free flasher
utility for the nokia internet tablets and receiving no support
from Nokia or the community to port the flasher to other operating
systems or architectures.

The bug report will be closed if somebody owning a mac tries to
build 0xFFFF from the sources. The only dependency is libusb, which
is also available on OSX and the last thing I do for it was as GUI
frontend, which is probably what OSX people is looking for.

About architectures, I have tested my flasher on multiple architectures
with different endians without any problem, so it should work on ppc
and x86.

I assume that an unofficial flasher makes the community think that it
can be a dangerous tool. But after two years of existence, nobody
report me issues about bricked devices after using 0xFFFF as a flasher.

As i read in the last update of the OS. Nokia provides now an OTA flashing
utility which allows to update the device without using an external
computer and USB. (i didnt update my n810 yet, but i would be interested
to see how it works :)

It is always good to see the intention of big companies freeing parts
of their software, but I think that it is a bit late.

I will be happy to see the evolution of the opening process of these
closed parts of Maemo (not only the flasher) to allow the community
enhace this wonderful software platform faster.

> Hi, are you aware of
> 
> https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100#c5
> 
> If we have a broad idea about the community interest in getting the
> Flasher open in order to develop e.g. a Mac OS X version, then I will
> have smoother path to get it open. Feel free commenting and voting
> there. If you are aware of other potential contributors feel free
> letting them know as well.
> 
> I think we will get it open anyway, but as said showing objective
> community interest always helps getting things done faster.
> 
> PS: Very similar case with https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013
> (PowerPC support for the Flasher).
> 
> -- 
> Quim Gil
> marketing manager, open source
> Maemo Software @ Nokia

  --pancake