Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

Is it possible to flash any existing phones other than Tablet editions with maemo?

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

no, it is not possible

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

Why not? All you would need is a) a bootloader b) a flasher capable of doing it

The way I understand it. And of course the effort required to port it to those devices.

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

Maemo is for touch screen devices only. It may work on the n97 or 5800 but definitely not on the n95 i guess?

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

Which will be a non-trivial amount of effort.

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it is not possible. Not feasible, perhaps...given the HUGE amount of work that would need to into porting it (as others have noted).

Now, it is not "possible" for *me* to do it (It would take a lifetime for me, personally, to do it) but a determined group of smart people could do it if they wanted (a "Mer" like project) though the hardware limitations might put a hard cap on what was ultimately able to be accomplished. Just my 2cp.

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

c) Keys to sign the bootloader.


Good luck getting those...

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

What keys? Please enlighten us on that. Also a bootloader is not necessary if you can reverse engineer what it needs to boot then provide the same hooks in.

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

I think he means that the software needs to be encrypted with proper keys so that the hardware agrees to boot it.

Re: Flashin Nokia N95 or anyother mobiles with Maemo
 

surely that could be qualified with "yet"
Linux has a way of moving to other hardware, why exclude our own strong stablemates?

The ongoing work with Mer as a strong base for maemo on multitple platforms shows it is at least possible.
it just takes time, energy, bacon, testing and enthusiasm :D

as for the bootloader keys - surely some nokia employees hang out round here who might be able to find a way at some point in the future ;)

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

The SoCs (System-on-Chip) that Nokia and others use have a small piece of code and a set of keys in ROM to check the authenticity of the bootloader. The bootloader then checks the authenticity of the firmware image (e.g. Symbian OS), which in turn checks the authenticity of each piece of software to be installed.

The check in Symbian OS has been defeated, but the other two checks have not been, to my knowledge.

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

OK so just needs plenty of computer time and brain power. ;)

In other words... not impossible... Just highly improbable ;)

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

the HTC universal was a brilliant piece of hardware, and at one point looked as if it was going to take over from the Zaurus as a pocket computer with keyboard as the Uni had wifi and bluetooth and phone features, when the Zaurus only had the CF slot.

The Uni came with Windows Mobile and even though there was almost no documentation people found a way to make it run linux. Progress was painful, but they managed pretty well.
http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Universal
Unfortunately by the time linux ran fairly well on it, the world was moving on and the universal was dropped from HTC's line and Android was imminent (very rough time lines).

So, yes, in theory it can be done, but it's very hard to get linux to run really well on a device so that all its hardware is supported... and quite often when the device's makers realise their device is under scrutiny, lock it down even more - see ipod linux projects.

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

http://www.nopcode.org/0xFFFF/?p=docu&q=faq - Shows some pretty interesting information about the N770/N800/N810´s bootloader :)

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

Does the N900 also have such cryptographic locking down of the boot sequence? I hope not, as this would contradict the entire philosophy of the "open device" that I've been hoping the N900 would deliver.

Will it be possible to flash my N900 with another operating system, should I so choose? Can I compile Maemo from source code, make some tweaks, and flash that? I had assumed the answers would be yes (just like with my trusty old Zaurus), but now I'm a little worried...

Re: Flashing Nokia N95 or any other mobile with Maemo
 

You can run other (linux) operating systems on the N900, like Debian, Mer, Ubuntu, probably Android, etc... AFAIK, you can't "compile Maemo" because it uses closed sourced apps. The open part of Maemo + community parts = mer. I mean you can flash the kernel, change all the **** you want, get root access in one second, etc...