[Liverpool] Maemo - back from the ashes?

[Dan Lynch]

Running 100% free software on a phone handset is virtually impossible right
now. If you want to make calls that is. The GSM chip drivers are all
proprietary. Some friends of mine from FSF use a custom build of Android
with all the proprietary stuff removed. Apart from the GSM driver. This the
absolute only concession they'll make, other wise it's not a phone, it's a
doorstop. They are pretty radical as you would imagine and if even they use
a proprietary driver then I think that says it all.

There are people working on FOSS solutions to this. Like the Replicant
project. I think it's based in Italy but I don't know how far along it is.
They're making a 100% free fork of Android but they're having to reverse
engineer all the drivers.

I don't have a link to hand but I'm sure Google can help :)

Dan
On Jun 24, 2011 4:01 AM, "Bob Ham" <rah at bash.sh> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 02:14 +0100, Andrew Bates wrote:
>
>> be prepared for maybe 6 months of support from Nokia
>
> Having been looking at the market for a phone recently, my criteria for
> a desirable phone is: does it run a Linux distribution? With, of
> course, a preference for hardware that doesn't require proprietary
> software to use it. I find myself scouring ebay for models in this
> list:
>
> http://shr-project.org/trac/wiki/Devices
>
> If/when I find myself with the budget of an employed person, I'll be
> looking at a Palm Pre 2. Not to use it as a webOS device of course,
> just as some hardware onto which SHR can be installed.
>
> The software provided by phone manufacturers now interests me just as
> much as the software provided by computer manufacturers. Which is to
> say, it doesn't interest me at all :-)
>
> Bob
>
> --
> Bob Ham <rah at bash.sh>
>
> for (;;) { ++pancakes; }
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