Originally Posted by momcilo

There are many unfinished FOSS software out there, but the reason you know is due to the open nature.

Quite opposite the basic idea of FOSS, beside having a free beer, benefiting form the others work and contributing, is to have a possibility to fix and enhance the software once the original vendor drops it.

It is about of protecting of your investment. Users invest in devices, developers invest time and knowledge.

People tend to forget that.

Originally Posted by tekki

I can back this up with URLs but too lazy, but Tegra2 drivers are usually published as part of Linux4Tegra distribution but is 'softfp'

The trimslice (google it) community got special builds of those drivers for MeeGo's 'hardfp' ABI

Originally Posted by gerbick

It's not that I don't believe you, but I sorta require proof that these drivers are of the optimized variety, not "it works" variety.

Originally Posted by tekki

I'm not sure what your definition of optimized variety is, but fair enough - I guess you might refer to non-optimized variety as noveau which is an open source driver for nVidia on PC? This is the closed driver stuff:

http://developer.nvidia.com/content/...pha-1-released

Google around for former releases. For nVidia on X86 I assume you know drivers are there too, see http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us , click operating system

For a video of the hardfp build that the slimtrice community uses, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfhiz_ORbwE

Originally Posted by gerbick

I'm not sure if I'd call Alpha level drivers optimized by a longshot, but as it stands... that's more than I knew just moments ago.

So thank you.

Originally Posted by qole

Here's my opinion about the future of Maemo and maemo.org. I am currently an (un-elected, volunteer) maemo community council member, and an avid member of this community for about 4 years.

Recently, there have been calls for the Maemo community to wrest all the closed bits out of the hands of Nokia, or to somehow turn Maemo into a separate, community-run entity, free of Nokia's sponsorship. I don't see these posts accomplishing anything for two simple reasons; we're never going to get the closed bits from Nokia, and the Maemo community is (almost) nothing without Nokia, mainly because Maemo is nothing without Nokia hardware and that hardware is no longer in production.

I think by the time Nokia funding runs out for maemo.org at the end of 2012 it will be a kingdom of dust; there will be a few nostalgic enthusiasts around, but it will be a lot like any other forum for niche, obsolete platforms; mostly deserted and uninteresting.

I don't see Nokia ever opening any of the closed pieces.

The one tiny hope I see is if a champion within Nokia with some political influence were to fight through the bureaucracy, inertia and indifference to wrestle the closed bits out into the open. But I really just do NOT see that happening, not with most of the closed bits having some link to hardware made by the notorious TI and most of the people who care being laid off from Nokia. Even when Maemo was a vibrant group within Nokia, nobody could get any action on opening closed pieces of old versions of Maemo. Now there is even less hope.

But even if the closed bits were made open, or Cordia succeeded in re-basing the Maemo UI on MeeGo, and Maemo flourished again, the hardware is aging fast. I don't expect to have a working N900 by mid-2012, although my N800 might keep chugging along with a partly-working touchscreen.

Is a community centred around the Cordia tablet really a Maemo community?

Where do I think we should go from here?

I think the best thing the Maemo community can do over the next year and a half is to transition to the MeeGo community, although I don't particularly like the MeeGo.com forums very much, and there haven't been any third-party ITT-style forums popping up elsewhere. I'm hoping for a new N9-centric community to grow up somewhere, hopefully outside of the Linux Foundation's sphere of control. I'll probably go there, wherever that is, until it sputters out in a couple of years.

You may have noticed that I'm not very hopeful. You're right, I'm not. This community has been so amazing, but the foundations are crumbling away beneath us and there's nowhere else to go.

Worst of all, I don't see any alternatives after Harmattan. I don't see anyone else taking up the MeeGo handset torch, and I don't see any other viable Linux handsets on the horizon. The WebOS devices are a possibility, but their current hardware is unappealing (to me), and everyone else is going towards Android, which doesn't have any kind of "normal" GNU/Linux stack, especially an X server. And don't even get me started on the "locked black box" OSes like iOS and WP7.

Are we doomed to lose the GNU\Linux in our Pockets?

Originally Posted by HellFlyer

I like your idea but as you said

"...the community began to diminish as interest fell due to people upgrading to new devices or breaking them, individual's websites and repositories dropped off..."


You cant just force people to support outdated devices or waste time collecting garbage for an OS that is dead. Most good things are closed source anyway

Originally Posted by speculatrix

[...]
Maybe it's just me but I have a freshly flashed n900 on loan and I followed the link to the ovi store and there's no n900/maemo stuff on there any more, whereas I seem to remember there were a bunch of games there like Angry Birds or Bounce?

Originally Posted by gerbick

I'm not sure if I'd call Alpha level drivers optimized by a longshot, but as it stands... that's more than I knew just moments ago.

Originally Posted by qole

Are we doomed to lose the GNU\Linux in our Pockets?