[maemo-developers] How much are Nxxx open?

[From: Jason Edgecombe]

Nicola Mfb wrote:
> Hi!
> I'm new to this community and these nice Nokia devices, and I'd like
> to join/contribute/develop for it and buy the upcoming N900.
> Before proceeding further I'd like to know a bit about its "openess".
> Already googled but there are not much and coherent informations about
> that.
> I come from OpenMoko Freerunner experience, where I'm able to flash
> the bootloader, the logo, the kernel, the rootfs and have multiple
> boot option to run several linux distro on different sd partitions.
> There are two bootloaders, the first in NOR readonly, the second in
> NAND and is used as default and is flashable, so you are able to use a
> modern and upgradable bootloader and if something goes wrong are able
> to debrick it booting from NOR, making the freerunner perfect as a
> Linux hacking device.
> The hardware is exposed by kernel in a standard way, e.g. the phone
> audio connections are managed by alsa while on other fakefree devices
> (like HTC dream) there are some closed source libraries to do that
> preventing the port of opensource phone stack (FSO).
> So may someone explain what's about the N900? How much is it open?
>
> Thank you in advance and best regards!
>   
Hello Nicola,

I'm not sure how open the phone part is because they haven't come out 
yet. I can tell you that the non-phone predecessors are very open. There 
are two things that aren't open: the OpenGL video drivers and the wifi 
drivers. There is a community-support linux distro called Mer that can 
be flashed to the N800 and N810 tablets or booted from SD card. You have 
the option of using a boot menu to choose which OS to boot. At one 
point, I have three installs of Maemo on my N800 and could chose which 
one to run at boot time.

You can try out the freemantle development VM to see what type of phone 
API's are exposed.

I hope this answered your questions.

Sincerely,
Jason