[maemo-developers] N770 OS2007 hacker edition made it to the title page of Linux Weekly News

[From: pancake]

io andrew

> Agreed, and with the start of 0xFFFF (how many Fs? ;-)) it's less

Heheh, 4, the required ones to fill a short variable :P

> important to get FIASCO images out: it certainly would give a
> community-driven OS2007on770 project flexibility.
>
> However, I'd still advocate in the short term that an ability to
> generate FIASCO images is important:
> 
>   1) there's a pretty Windows GUI for it already

What is windows?

I'm writing a GTK+ (glade) frontend in C for 0xFFFF and other flashers
for embedded devices like the one for the HTC phones. I have lot of wishes
for it and very little time for coding :(

But i'll happily receive your ideas and tips for it (here or in the 0xFFFF
mailing list).

>   2) 0xFFFF isn't necessarily mature enough yet.

Well I don't use the nokia one anymore, and works pretty fine, but I agree
that it needs more work and a better code reorganization, but it's in a
early stage (0.1). 

> However, I'd imagine in time the OS2007on770 project would start
> shipping tarballs containing bzImage, initfs.img, rootfs.img (say) and
> use 0xFFFF - with knowledge of these tarballs - to upgrade all the
> components (or just the changed components) in one go.

A tarball would be ok, but I would prefer to design a standard format
for firmwares for embedded devices as I said in:

   http://nopcode.org/0xFFFF/?p=docu&q=nokia-tips

"""
  The (new and old) FIASCO firmware format is not a very clean format, it
  doesn't provide any checksumming facility to ensure that the contents of
  the firmware have been modified or incorrect, so i'll rather encourage
  to design and create a standard firmware format for embedded devices with
  checksumming, signatures, handling libraries, documentation and so.

  I'll happilly collaborate on the design of this open firmware format, and
  it would be used on all the open source-based devices to aim interoperability
  between devices and flashers, providing a more standard and reliable way of
  flashing devices.

  This will ease the development on new devices, so the information and the
  code could be revised and enhaced by zillions of eyes.
""""

0xFFFF actually autodetects the piece type automatically, so no need for specifying
what is what, the 'tarball' support can be done with a wrapper shellscript.

> A more laudable aim if OS2007on770 starts forking off from Nokia's IT
> releases would be apt-gettable upgrades (but let's file that under
> "Long Term Goals" ;-)).

hehehe an apt-like upgrades would be really nice! Another thing that I really miss
from each nokia firmware release is the lack of commandline tools like ping, telnet(or nc),
gunzip...

I was thinking on the possibility of writing a simple program packaged into a
maemo-deb to allow backups from/to the device using the 0xFFFF graphical frontend,
rsync and ssh can be used.


  --pancake