Nokia N810 announced!
17.Oct.2007
It’s announced, we did it!
Ari has some more gory details about what’s new and cool. From the toolkit point of view one thing worth mentioning is that we’re now running the full gtk-2.10 stack in Chinook (the OS release powering the n810). Now, there are two things to that:
The bad thing is that due to the consolidation efforts the API compatibility is broken. Let me stress that again: if your application uses UI, it won’t run at all on Chinook without (often trivial) modifications. We have documents and tools to assist you in porting the applications. So go ahead, download Chinook beta and update your app – there is a lot of cool stuff in maemo garage that we need to make run on Chinook also. You can nag us on the IRC channel or mailing lists for help on specific issues. We’ll help.
The good thing is that we’re now very much closer to the gtk upstream and you can expect the toolkit stack to behave in a much more sane and predictable way. We’ll also now be able to actually track the API stability more closely.
As Ari also mentioned, Chinook is going to be available for n800 also. While it’s common for companies to provide firmware/bugfix updates for legacy hardware, it’s pretty rare to get a full new OS release + new features for free. I’m glad we did it since… well… it’s exactly the right thing to do!
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6 Comments
How hard is it to build binary debs for all three major OS versions (mistral, bora, chinook) from a single source package?
Yes, and it would also be exactly the right thing to do to finally include the active 770 user community again. Call it hacker if you must but I prefer to think of my 770 as of a mini-PC than of a cell phone and then being tied to a certain OS release is a strange feeling. Especially in Linux context.
It should be possible with a few #ifdef’s. I wouldn’t bother too much about bora though – Chinook will run where Bora runs so asking people to upgrade is fair.
Scond tilman, I love my 770, and don’t really need anything else hardware wise. Software wise however… so, any chance someone might port Chinook to the 770, minus some features of course.
For that matter I’d hope maemo in general would move to a more open distro development model like Debian or Fedora - wiping and reflashing yet again is just no fun. Being able to track incremental improvement on my tablet would seriously rock.
Hi Michael, First, was nice to (fast) meet you there in helsinki, and I’m really excited about having chinook on both devices. About the tearing, we knew that it was going to happen :p and actually as we are also supporting the N800 (and the 770 most probably) tearing is our buddy now =) let’s how we can hide them as much as possible.
I need to confess that I’m not helping that much in this area because the new UI designs have a lot of horizontal accelerated scrolling. This will suck ! I can already fell people wanting to kick my ass when we release =) I think I will ask the guys to enable a “change to vertical scrolling” as a gconf string =)
Cheers from Brazil, and congrats on the work!
Marcelo
@tilman, nona: If it was up to me, I would go for supporting 770. But on the other hand, I find it very hard to justify where your expectations come from. When I bought my Palm few years ago, I got one insignificant software udpate. This goes for pretty much any consumer electronics product – when you buy it, you buy it “as is”. You don’t expect software updates for your phone, your mp3 player, your gps navigator… so why do you expect updates for the two-year old internet tablet?
I’m not saying that we’re perfect and “oh-so-great” (we’re not, in many areas). But in this particular case, we definitelly do much more than others. Try to appreciate that so that this company notices and continues with this approach. Otherwise it’s going to sink in the “we’ll never make them happy” way of thinking.
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