Nokia's Os2008 On Zaurus Or Chroot Under Debian

[matthis]

Would it be possible to get os2008 and its cool maemo stuff running on the Z?
Here are the links to the rootfs: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/d1.php

[Cyberdoc1971]

Sounds like your Z has some Tablet envy, lol...seriously not sure if you can, I'm planning to get one of the N810's myself next payday. But I think that the os2008 and its cool maemo stuff is tuned to the hardware of the Nokia tablet... you might run into some hardware issues.

[Capn_Fish]

Would it be possible to get os2008 and its cool maemo stuff running on the Z?
Here are the links to the rootfs: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/d1.php

First off, let people know that I find Maemo to be lousy and something to be replaced, not added.

Anyway, I believe the answer is maybe. You'd need to recompile it (the NITs are ARM11 or ARM6, I can't remember which), but everything SHOULD work on the Z with some hacking. Even the GUI was made resolution-independent, so the differing resolutions shouldn't be an issue.

Just don't expect to use the binary-only stuff, like Flash (thought you COULD use the browser without it) or Skype.

[speculatrix]

first problem is that the nokias use the TI omap processor, so there are binary compatibility issues, which means you're going to have to build from source. You might find get better compatibility with the 770 as that has an older processor than the 800 and 810.

second problem is not all of maemo/hildon is open source, but you could probably build most of the software, but not sure what would be missing. your best bet would be to ask on internettablettalk forum (or search there) to find out whether you could build the complete system image from source, minus kernel (use the one from angstrom or debian) or at least enough to make it work!

[JohnX]

OS2008 is just Linux + X11 + panels + hildon apps. The most interesting part of that I think is the apps themselves. In that cast, getting specific hildon apps running under Debian might be the best way to go about it. The hildon libs are already there and if you have the source it shouldn't be too difficult, just a matter of repackaging. As for binary compatibility: The PXA255 and PXA270 Zauruses are an armv5te and the N8x0 is an armv6tje w/ VFP. They can both run baseline EABI binaries (which is what Debian is compiled as) but if you compile an app for the N8x0 that uses the N8x0's VFP (vector floating point) it won't work on the Zaurus since the Zaurus doesn't have one. Anything that's EABI with softfloat should be fine I would think. Still, most of the interesting stuff is open source.

-John