My N950 is still working fine, it just has a cracked screen which makes it a little hard to read.

I have received many wonderful things from Nokia over the last few years, including trips and devices.

I bought an N9 "for my wife", but mainly so I could have one of those wonderful "museum pieces" in my home.

I have two big problems right now, and neither of them is "I need a new development device".

The first problem is that Harmattan security was designed to be incompatible with my chroot solution. This means that the only way anyone can install an "Easy Debian" is to install an unofficial "open kernel" that displays a big "ZOMG YOUR WARRANTY IS VOID!!!11" message or an even more unofficial security crack (Inception). There is no way any package I make will ever be allowed into any official repository, because of its dependencies on such things. It may not even be allowed into semi-official repositories such as apps.formeego.org, but I haven't researched this enough.

It seems pretty clear to me that Easy Debian is not just ignored by Nokia as it was in the past, it is discouraged. And that is pretty discouraging. I could probably put together a package over a weekend, but getting it published will be very difficult. And if I get it published, then I'm in for a world of pain when it comes to supporting the package, because so many things can go horribly, horribly wrong and that just doesn't sound like much fun.

My other main problem is that this is the sunset of Nokia's Linux OS. After years of developing and supporting the chroot solutions for Maemo, I'm really finding it difficult to continue development when I don't see any road forward for my work.

I've really been deflated about this whole thing. First, Nokia crippled their wonderful OS with a user-hostile security system, then they laid off all the great people who developed Maemo and MeeGo, and completely and utterly abandoned the whole platform.

It is so very hard to keep up my enthusiasm in the face of these odds, and I confess that I have mostly failed to do so.

My current dream-scheme involves building a small "handtop" from a PandaBoard and a 7" touchscreen, powered by AA rechargeable batteries, and running Linux on it.