Hi guys.

I'm just trying to understand how Maemo compares with other OSs.

Is Maemo 4,5 more like:
Modern 64bit OS with hardware assisted 3D GUI?
Mature 32bit OS, lots of apps, simple GUI.
16bit OS, old, but can run on the most primative hardware.

What desktop version of Linux is Maemo most similar?

I had trouble just finding if OMAP2,3 is 16, 32, or 64bit. Guessing must be at least 32bit since they use 128 megs of RAM.

Thanks! Please use correct terminology so I can search keywords myself.

It's a Linux.

No.

Yes.

No.

Debian.

You should consider using Google (www.google.com) and Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) to search for information. Please, do not hesitate to ask for tutorial on how to use these tools.

Thanks for the post. (this thread should have gone in the General section)
Of course I used google and wikipedia. You can't tell I'm resonabily tech savy by how I wrote the questions? Anyway, Debian is a good place to start looking. Seems to be like Debian 4.0.
Since Linux was around since the early 1990s, I don't think Maemo can be easily called "It's a Linux" since Linux has been constantly updated since the introduction.

I can't.

A Linux is a Linux, independently on how often it is being updated.

Whether an OS is 32bit or 64bit really doesn't tell you anything about the ui. That being said Maemo is just another (relatively) modern llinux distro. In some ways it's a little bit immature and in constant development. When you try to characterize maemo you really have to think about as two parts. The base system is debian-based, but it does have some optimizations to behave better on embedded systems. For example it has well integrated power management and uses busybox instead of coreutils. At the GUI level it's pretty different from desktop linux distros. The gui consists of hildon-desktop, matchbox window manager and apps linked against gtk and libhildon for consistency. There are however many apps using other toolkits. notable examples include liqbase, vgba aand canola. If you have any specific question please feel free to ask.

Looking the documentation in http://maemo.org also helps.

http://maemo.org/development/documentation/Quick%20Start%20Guide/

There is a more detailed comparison of Maemo with Debian and Ubuntu in the Maemo Reference Guide.

Sure I know whether an OS is 32bit or 64bit has nothing to do with the GUI. I was just trying to get a rough idea on how modern the current Maemo is in relation to other Linux versions and completely different OSs (like Windows Vista).
Johnx, thanks for the info, you did explain a lot of what I was looking for.
Also thanks for the link qgil. I will want to get my feet wet in Maemo application development.
I think I have enough and keywords to do my own searching for more detail.
Thanks again

64bit-ness has little to do with modernity, the 64bit and 32bit flavours are maintained in parallel, and in fact up until quite recently you'd have to forgo many closed source apps/plugins (e.g. flash) if you were running a 64bit Linux.

Yes, OMAP2 is 32bit, as is OMAP3 afaik.

The OMAP2420 in the N8x0 machines has 3D/2D video hardware acceleration, but we lack drivers, and therefore the UI is not written to use acceleration.

OpenVMS