Using linux, not maemo.
 

this is my idea:
we can boot from MMC with bootmenu utility, we have a base linux system on mmc with some easy commands.

so it's possible use xfree and one window manager like twm or any other light wm?

so we don't need to port software for maemo we can use standard linux apps.

Maybe one of the readily available mini-distros could be adapted?

There is a lot of work still to be done, though (touch screen interface, power management, remapping hardware buttons, HWR input, tweaking WiFi, BT and USB support for the 770's specific hardware, all the stuff I've forgotten).

fvwm-Crystal would be a nice environment, if it could be run on the 770's hardware.

Porting would still be required, unless the processor in your desktop is ARM based. :) It would reduce the amount of work in conforming to the Hildon UI, but to even get another flavour of Linux to boot... that's daunting.

Well there is kdrive x server on the device http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/kdrive.html , If there is something wrong ,you can get its source (apt-get source xserver-kdrive) in scratchbox and hack it.
Also there is light wm running on the device, it is called matchbox http://projects.o-hand.com/matchbox/
You can use them even now :) But they simply don't look good enough and are not suitable for such small and memory limited device.

But don't get me wrong, go ahead and try something. Buth first examine how current device works and what is good to replace and why.

Also please define what 'standard linux apps' is. So far I thought linux is known to not to have any standard apps, everything is configurable and depends on user choice.

uhmm no we can use the default kernel that have all hw support. or use something more usefull like:

Linux Nokia770-26 + IPv6 + NFS v3 client support
bye Ville Reijonen

No. we can use one of the million of distro arm based.

Debian have an arm release.

http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

...maemo use EABI

http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort

Right, Maemo is based on Debian... but ARM binaries aren't exactly abundant. My point was, you still need to port them, even if it's just moving from x86 to ARM.

There is small problem, some critical things like battery charging are not handled in kernel. These things are handled inside dsme (device state monitoring entity?) daemon which is closed source. Kernel contains only generic driver for N770 specific chips (tahvo,retu) which provides access to (undocumented) HW registers and the logic is inside dsme. So for full HW support you probably need it running which means you also need to accept other things dsme does like controling brightness and display blanking, watchdog for reboots nad maybe also some power management stuff (not sure about this). And this is further tied to dbus and gconf configuration system. So this may be not as easy as you think. There may be no good place where you could draw line and do not loose some important functionality.

That would be awesome,
 

make it so # 1, I want have a real desktop and window manager. I have been enjoying my buggy 770 for almost a year now, I guess I shouldn't say that, 2005 OS was much more stable, hopefully 2006 updates will becoming soon. It would be really cool to be able to rotate the screen though.

Couldn't a new window manager be installed and chosen at login like redhat does. other options would be great!!

good post...
The problem of our device is that we must attend someone that make the port of every application. If we can install any debian arm binary we don't wait nobody. Opensource world have a software for anything!

what we need for use debian arm package?
Only normal windows manager, probably we don't need xorg/xfree Xomap is good.

The device have good hardware, the screen resolution is very large.

I see no mention of using GPE, why not use that? It should provide you with the majority of what you want.

As fanoush said, some things are not handled in the kernel, however if you leave the initfs there (and running) battery charging still works fine.

Looks like some recent rootfs's here: http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/.../experimental/

The issues were as follows (the last time I ran the image, which was last year). This is basically copied from my post here: http://www.oesf.org/forums/lofiversi...p?t19354.html:

* Backlight control doesn't work very well - it works (writing and reading from /sys entry) for a second or two, however then the nokia stuff grabs control back and changes the backlight up to full brightness again. To fix this, you'd need to send dbus commands to change the backlight. The format has been documented afaik, so it just requires some reasonably simple patches to minilite (these may have been implemented by now).

* Sound doesn't work - This ought to be hackable, the dsp needs to be initialised, looking at the contents of the maemo image, this should be reasonably easy - just a case of copying scripts and the .bin file across.

* Power management - if anything keeps a clock running, the power management won't kick in (dyntick). Therefore you can't have the clock open as an applet on the gpe taskbar. I imagine other apps will also cause this kind of problem. Also note that maemo probably has far better control of the peripheral devices, so it's power management may be better (though that stuff may run from the initfs anyway so would work with a gpe-image, I'm not sure.)

* No battery power reporting - battery reporting is handled by dbus again. I think someone's decoded the readings, however it doesn't have very fine granularity which is a shame.

Also note Florian's comments in this ml post (it's rather old now, I'm not sure how things have changed): http://maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-dev...st/000960.html



Simon

did u try this image http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/...0.rootfs.jffs2 ?

It's necessary port application for familiar?

I've tried one of the images, though it was an older one iirc. It's not necessarily necessary to port anything as there are already a large number of packages available to be built using the OpenEmbedded metadata and bitbake build system. See here: http://openembedded.org/

Depending on the libc version and soft-float type of the image, the standard familiar/OpenZaurus/etc. feeds may work with it too.


Si

I'm not sure how to read this thread; Maemo is Linux as far as any other distribution is Linux... Which means it, of course, is *not* Linux, because Linux is only the kernel and Maemo (as any other distro) packs a lot more around it. Which is good, of course. I wouldnt spend a lot of time with my 770 only watching the kernel booting and rebooting.

But:
There's an interesting point to this thread. Would it be possible (or easily possible, to be more precise) and legal to replace the non-free parts of the software package Nokia ships with the 770 right now and create a completely free system?

Which exactly are the non-free parts? What were Nokias motives to have non-free software on a device that was at least somehow marketed as "built upon free software"?

Certainly. Why not? The hardware is yours to do with as you please. You might void your warranty by installing different system software and you're not allowed to copy the hardware and sell for profit, but other than that, Nokia has no rights whatsoever to it, once you've bought it.

IIRC, the non-free parts have to do with battery and power management. It's a pretty certain bet that the 770 is not APM or even ACPI compliant, so writing software that duplicates Nokia's offering might be non-trivial. OTOH, people have reported serious bugs with Nokia's power management (haven't seen those myself, though), so maybe a fresh look at it might turn out in Nokia's best interest as well. And why should Nokia care if the (new) power management software is open? It'll almost certainly run exclusively on their hardware platform.

As to their motives: who knows? Maybe they outsourced it to people with a GPL allergy. It happens.

Maemo not have software. Openembedded yes. We don't need to use maemo.

Angstorm use openembedded for build image and is ready for nokia 770 but I can't try becouse my nokia die.

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/building-angstrom

try this..