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

[From: pancake]

On Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:20:19 +0200
Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> ext pancake wrote:
> > Hello Quim!
> 
> Hi pancake, nice to see you around.  :)

Yay :)

> > 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.
> 
> It's all about priorities and context. Many things have changed at Nokia
> since you released your flasher. At the time pushing the opening of the
> official flasher would have taken a lot of effort and there were other
> priorities. Now the context helps and the idea has been queuing for so
> long that other priorities are solved now.
> 
> About lack of community support, perhaps a joint project on the official
> code would be more appealing?

I understand that a flashing utility is maybe not the most priority task
inside a project like this.

With my project I tried to offer a free implementation of the flasher to
and for the community aiming to bypass the operating system and architecture
restriction offered by the blobs.

So I think that it is a valid solution for closing these opened bugs, or at
least allow mips, arm, powerpc and OSX users flash their Internet Tablets
natively.

> > 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.
> 
> Sure, but what if one day the architecture changes for whatever reason
> and then you have your reverse engineered tool out of the game for new
> releases? I'm not saying there are plans for such changes, but I guess
> it's always more optimal that everybody works on the same tool.

I think that 0xFFFF has filled a blank for two years. It is sad to see
a project 'die', but it currently works and do more actions than the
flasher-3.0 does and it was community

I understand that having two flasher utilities available gives a choice to
the user, but it will be easier to just maintain a single one. Btw I got
fun while doing it and it was not that hard to implement it, so keeping
in sync is not a hard job.

After that, I can say that both projects can learn from each other and
community will be beneficied by this.

> > 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.
> 
> Perhaps, but here we are with the offer.
>
> > 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.
> 
> Should we take this as a yes?  :)

Yes, I think that would be nice to have it free, as I said, both projects
can learn from each other :)
 
> About opening fiasco-gen, it might happen as well. We will start
> releasing it as a binary.

fiasco-gen? is this the firmware packer program? This is for example
already done in 0xFFFF, as I said when releasing the flasher I think
that would be nice to have the specs, or at least to open a discussion
with the community to design a standard format.

  --pancake