Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

See mojo.handhelds.org for details, particularly this PDF.

via http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2097004728.html

Apparently Ubuntu 7.04 (two versions old, wtf?) can run in a chroot on N800 now. This will be a lot cooler if/when they get 8.04 actually booting, and running Hildon from Ubuntu Mobile.

Hopefully Nokia will abandon their half-assed proprietary distribution and start shipping a real OS!

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

O.k. - I'm game. I have a N800 and an extra 2Gb chip. Can anyone tell me the steps necessary to "run in CHROOT"?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

There's a few threads here on running Debian on the tablets; one of them is about using it in chroot. That information is applicable. Oh, and this ain't VMS; it's chroot, not CHROOT. ;).

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Are you going to complain about breaking backwards compatibilty too?

There's no reason to switch to Ubuntu.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I cant wait to see this happen.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Don't go getting your panties in a bunch just yet. Just because it says ubuntu does not mean all the apps/packages/binaries you are used to using are going to work. They are Not! Each and every package will have to be recompiled for the arm architecture. Don't go thinking that you will be able to jusr grab whuchever arbitrary package and install it, because it will not work that easily.

pardon the typos
im posting this on m n800's on screen kb

eric

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Either this article or the mojo site is not very accurate - the article states that they had completed building Gutsy Gibbon, while on the site only Feisty is shown as completed and with only src packages for download.

Looks like they have more road to cover before any usable binaries are released.

Good effort though.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Wow, I ain't complaining.

I'd keep Maemo on my flash but I sure as hell wouldn't turn the idea of it being on my MMC down.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

It seems I am in a dream. If nokia also releases the closed driver parts of their devices I dont want to wake up.

I guess Ubuntu will not work if a new kernel cannot read old proprietary drivers ...

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

They can use the already available kernels... or release the drivers as binary.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Both options su...

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

any screenshots?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Looks like they did build binaries (how useful i dont know yet).

http://repository.handhelds.org/

Hmm so looks like its built for 770 (armv5) and 800/810 (armv6 + vfp)

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

w00t, i can get frisky with my n800!

eek, s/with/on ;) :p

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

You're joking right?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

well what do you expect to get out of ubunru u cant get out of a debian base now?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Slower boot, unoptimized for small screen apps... such things :)

btw, why the packages are arm and not armel?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Maybe because ubuntu is based on stable debian, while armel is only for lenny?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Index of /
Name Last modified Size Description

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

frisky-armv5el/ 12-Apr-2008 07:44 -
frisky-armv6el-vfp/ 13-Apr-2008 14:57 -
frisky-source/ 09-Apr-2008 14:26 -
ubuntu/ 16-Apr-2008 10:09 -

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I'm dead serious. There's absolutely no reason to switch from a Debian base to another Debian base.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Are there any installation guides available?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

According to this article
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2097004728.html

... "Speaking at the Embedded Linux Conference in Mountain View this week, Christian showed an N800 tablet running the GIMP, an open source image processing package that he said worked well on the device. "

Does that mean that it is possible in the not so far away future to run GIMP even with OS2008. Although this is Ubuntu port it shouldn't be
too difficult to port it to Maemo? I always thought that GIMP would be too impractical: slow and memory hungry with clunky interface for my N800. How can it run "well"?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I don't believe he got it running so well... at least not 2.4.x

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

It is all actually EABI (armel) even though they say "arm" in the arch field and the .deb filenames.... They plan to make different versions for different arm chips, instead of having one big arm/armel port for everybody like Debian does. They explain it in this presentation: http://mojo.handhelds.org/files/Hand...jo_ELC2008.pdf

Haha, I do enjoy Navi's trolling... But just in case any one is tempted to believe that nonsense, the PDF linked above explains the rationale -- they say Maemo has "~700" packages while Ubuntu has ">10000". And actually, that number is closer to 20000 (and Debian has even more).

So, if Maemo is "Debian based" why can't we use all those packages now? Because the internet tablet OS is not actually in sync with any released distro, so everything needs to be (at the very least) recompiled.

Iirc ITOS2005 had some amount of binary compatibility with Debian's arm port, which made many things usable without recompiling (I'm not sure how much, I only used OS2005 for a few weeks before OS2006 came out). Nokia's ITOS2006 broke this compatibility for a good reason, the switch to EABI (armel). At the time there was no Debian armel. Now, there is, but only in the unstable branch.

In a nutshell: Running a proper distro like Ubuntu or Debian on the tablet (instead of Nokia's "debian-based" ITOS crap) is extremely attractive because the porting effort is shared with those targeting other arm devices, which translates to more software being available (and, kept updated).

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

What about the first part of my post? Recompile is not a panacea. Ubuntu system requirements according to their page are above the ones of a typical N8x0 and a full blown desktop most probably will be heavy and not very usable. [link]

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Ubuntu's recommended minimum system specs (384MB RAM / 8GB disk / x86 CPU @ 700Mhz / screen capable of 1024x678) are for a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop able to run big apps like OpenOffice, and no, I certainly wouldn't expect to see OO running on an N800 :)

However, this page claims that some form of Ubuntu can still be made to run on a 486 with 32MB of RAM and 300MB of disk!

In any case, the obvious thing from Ubuntu to run on the NIT is the Ubuntu Mobile Edition (with Hildon), which didn't exist yet in 7.04. So, why they're porting 7.04 and 7.10 when 8.04 is nearing release is beyond me.

But if/when 8.04 is available for ARM, it should be trivial to recompile all of the existing OS2008 "hildonised" apps for Ubuntu. So, I think 8.04-on-ARM really is a panacea of sorts :)

I really really really hope that ITOS2009 is nothing more than Ubuntu 8.04 (or 8.10, or 9.04 or whatever, but a *released distro*) plus whatever extra packages Nokia wants to add. That way, we will be able to apt-get install (and upgrade!) thousands of packages which are maintained by people who don't know or care about internet tablets per se.

Prior to hearing about this development, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying another Nokia product because of the horrible decisions they've made with OS2007/2008. Now, I'm not so sure.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

so... does this mean i should stop trying to get kde to run on my n800?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

How are you trying? Penguinbait has instructions and a package available, with which you should be able to run KDE under OS2008 currently... it is just big (it won't fit on the N800's built-in storage) and RAM hungry (but, with enough swap it works).

The Ubuntu ARM port doesn't have KDE yet because their build systems didn't have enough RAM (apparently building KDE requires more than 256MB...) but it will eventually. For now, if you want KDE, go here (I've never tried it myself, but many people in that thread appear to be using it just fine).

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

KDE is decent, but installation of programs is a real pain with KPackage's Fixup...it downloaded so many extra 'dependancies' that it broke my installation. Now, I will have to reflash Maemo. I think I will give up trying to make KDE work. I am really looking forward to Ubuntu, is there any ETA?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

OS200x and Ubuntu Mobile have only hildon and the debian parent in common. Ubuntu Mobile will power up the so called MIDs, while i expect OS2009 again will be Maemo based. However software will be possible to run with simple recompile (since the hildon libraries are common between the two.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Well, there's always something "better" around the corner that will break compatibility with the "now." I look forward to Ubuntu, but I can certainly wait. Maemo is doing the job just fine for now.

- Jim

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I agree. Unless Ubuntu will completely replace maemo I will wait. Running KDE or Ubuntu on top of maemo is not a replacement of maemo.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I just want an actual port of RealPlayer for ARMEL/Debian devices, instead of some half-baked plugins that barely work.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Thats surprising that you say that, most people including me HATE Realplayer the app, the maemo media player handles real media very well IMHO without the horror that is realplayer.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

The plugins do not work in all instances where RealPlayer is needed. Even the mplayer plugin did not do what I needed.

That's just me though. How hard would it be to compile Real's existing package for Linux to ARMEL/Debian?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

If the source is available, it shouldn't be that hard. Why not give it a try?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Um, just to mention that Real and Helix players are non-oss.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I thought Helix was open source? (with dodgy licenses or something)
Maximos: But you know that N800 comes with Helix GStreamer codecs right?

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_Community#Licenses

Second paragraph. Without these the Helix player won't be of much use.

Re: Nokia is porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Interesting read (the mojo pdf) indeed.

I like the naming of the distribution for the newest-

"grumpy"