Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Hehe, my friend once got a Nokla "N95" of ebay :P

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I don't accept either statement.

Anyone who bought the eee over an N8x0 didn't really want the latter platform's form factor. The differences are significant.

And the Atom remains unproven in cell phones. ARM's power management will likely render Atom a mostly moot point in that area.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

If I've learned one thing from my years of following technology related news, its that you never trust anyone who waves something around in front of a crowd at a technology show and says that the thing he's gotten working for the first time is "running well". If they do a demo, they're always careful to skirt around the unstable stuff, or even worse, they just run a mock-up of the technology. I suspect the latter with the whole tablet video-out thing that supposedly could run HD video from the tablet... riiiight.

I mean, come on. GIMP on the tablet running well? I can only assume that means he got it to compile and run -- that's still a long shot from "running well." Heck, if it were that easy, we'd have VLC and Abiword and a bunch of other stuff on the tablet now.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I think the tablet already has the Helix binaries on-board, as part of the GStreamer framework. That's why we can play Real media in the first place. You might be able to compile the RealPlayer stuff using these binaries, if you can find them on the tablet.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

The "pool" directories are pretty skimpy right now -- there's almost no interesting software compiled in there yet. There's no GIMP, either.

By the way, why is this better or more interesting than the Debian armel ports underway?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Gimp is there: http://repository.handhelds.org/fris...l/main/g/gimp/

Lots of reasons: The Ubuntu Mobile Edition (uses Hildon, will be shipping on MIDs soon), Nokia's sponsorship of this port (so, presumably they'll make the proprietary hw bits work), Ubuntu's every-six-months release cycle, version 8.04 receiving security updates until 2011 ...

Of course, the Debian armel port is very interesting too, and some maemo stuff is being packaged in Debian now... but their armel distribution is of their next version, lenny, which may or may not be released before the end of this year (officially, no release date has been set). It is possible to use Debian armel on an NIT right now (in a chroot, or by booting it), but obviously companies aren't going to ship something that expects their users to track the testing or unstable versions of Debian (where there are frequent changes and sometimes things get broken).

I expect that both Ubuntu and Debian (lenny) will eventually become good OSes for use on the tablet. As I said before, I hope that Nokia's official OS fades away into a mere set of packages that are installed on top of Ubuntu proper. If it could be installed on other distros too, that would be even better.

But what I'd really like, besides access to the thousands of packages in these distros, is security updates from people who take it more seriously than Nokia does.

Nokia does not even bother with security updates.

Is this a bad thing? I dunno... Here's a random example from Debian's security page: DSA-1537-1 xpdf -- several vulnerabilities. This describes three different bugs which each allow "execution of arbitrary code" by PDF files, which means that every PDF you load can technically do *anything* to your system. What version of xpdf does Nokia ship? Inside of osso-pdf-viewer_1.4.41-0.tar.gz you'll find they're using version 3.0.0, released in January 2004. I guess Nokia just assumes nobody would ever load PDFs from untrusted sources on their tablets... or that security of always-on internet devices with cameras and microphones just isn't that important?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Ohhhh... for some reason I was looking in the frisky-armv6el pool. I guess that's for a different processor... :o

I didn't realize Nokia was sponsoring this project. That's very cool.

I think Nokia believes (1) the user base of the Maemo devices is so small that criminals aren't going to waste their time targeting the device, (2) that the firmware is changing so rapidly (a new version each year) that the already small target of the NITs is also moving rapidly. I think Nokia knows that the predators attack the weak and slow of the herd... :D

EDIT: Before I start a flame war, I just want to say that I believe we should get regular security updates. I believe that, starting with Diablo, Nokia will have the infrastructure in place to be able to give us those updates without having to flash the firmware each time.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I think you're probably right about Nokia thinking that way, but imo Nokia is horribly wrong. It would be easy for an attacker to target an individual user with a link to a malicious PDF, or to target a large number of tablet users by posting such a link at a forum like this (or on IRC, or comments in a blog on planet maemo, etc). Shipping software with known vulnerabilities and not even having a mechanism in place to provide updates is really just irresponsible. In Nokia's case, they have a mechanism in place, but they apparently have a policy to not bother with upgrades until "Diablo" is released. The PDF bug I mentioned is the tip of the iceberg... anyone could search security lists for the names of any of the hundreds of out-of-date pieces of software in ITOS and they would probably find plenty more.

Um, wouldn't that be us tablet users here? Releasing a few updates a year is not what I could call "moving rapidly". Compare this list of known vulnerabilities in Firefox with the about: screen on your tablet's browser.

It will be interesting to see if an updated version of osso-pdf-reader ships in diablo, or after diablo, or ever... as I said, technically the infrastructure to provide updates is in place already, and it has been since the 770 days. They just don't use it. If Nokia cared at all about security, we would have updates available in the application manager today. What exactly Diablo is going to enable them to do that they couldn't do already isn't really clear to me.

BTW, if you'd like to read PDFs on your NIT without being vulnerable to the three issues in that advisory I mentioned, the new Evince that was recently released uses libpoppler2 version 0.6.2-1.maemo1, which (according to this) includes fixes for those bugs.

Unfortunately, though, I was unable to install evince when I just attempted to, because the unrar package is not in the repositories. Yet another thing that would work right if we had a real distro instead of this ITOS garbage...

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

You're rather wrong here - you can't blame Nokia that you can't find the not released by them deps to a not released by them package. Its another question that their package manager prefer to not resolve the dependencies of a package not coming from a repo..

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

You're right, I can't blame Nokia for unofficial packages' dependency problems; but can't I blame the lack of a real distro?

Unrar is in the non-free and multiverse sections of Debian and Ubuntu, respectively, so if/when the ITOS ever gets in sync with those distros there wouldn't be a need for a Maemo-specific unrar package.

And that lack of a real distro... I think we can blame Nokia for that. But, of course, the whole subject of this thread is that they may finally be getting on the right track in that regard.

It would be really nice to have some official word about what (if any) relation this "mojo" port has to the future of ITOS. I pinged qgil, hopefully he'll weigh in.