Standard distribution [LWN.net]

Standard distribution

Posted Oct 14, 2009 20:03 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
In reply to: Maemo Summit 2009: Fremantle, Harmattan, and N900 by cry_regarder
Parent article: Maemo Summit 2009: Fremantle, Harmattan, and N900

Well, I run FreeRunner with Debian and it surely is a standard distribution. The only package not from Debian main repository is the kernel, since there are still a few Neo FreeRunner drivers not in Linus' tree.

Of course, the point was "shipping". OpenEmbedded (based) is not maybe a standard, though it is quite popular in various embedded devices including Palm Pre phone. It could also have been pointing a finger at the faults of the shipping software compared to eg. Stable Hybrid Release (SHR), but it is a working phone out of the box.

And finally, one could argue if maemo is a distribution or a glorified SDK. I think not all deb:s are installable from a public repository with source code where available, so it's not that trivial to build one's package selection from scratch? Please correct if I'm wrong, ie. is the delta between Maemo and Mer ("maemo reconstructed) really small or not. Mer seems like a real distribution.

But whatever the case, Nokia N900 is by far the best mass-market choice to recommend to others if one wants to somehow advance open source mobile stuff. Maybe in a year or two it will run on standard Debian as well without losing any features.

[ending with obligatory mention about Nokia's open^H^H^H^H"proprietary" Ogg family media formats support]

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Ogg Support

Posted Oct 16, 2009 10:34 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

As you know and has been discussed to death, the availability of installable, but not shipped software is irrelevant to the discussion of major manufacturers supporting open media formats instead of continuing to strenghten by-definition non-interoperable world in the area of video and sound.

It's not a big surprise that on a relatively open device you can install own software.

Ogg Support

Posted Oct 16, 2009 10:58 UTC (Fri) by Jaffa (guest, #4327) [Link]

Big companies are complex entities with one division having one opinion and another another.

Nokia don't ship Ogg out-of-the-box, but you can get a tier-1 experience by installing a single package, so I really fail to see the point of people being puritanical about Ogg support.

Do you want Nokia to ship support out-of-the-box' Nokia to expose their lawyers' concerns; or Nokia to publicly endorse Ogg Vorbis et al (but still not ship it)?

Ogg Support

Posted Oct 16, 2009 11:17 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

A lot of organizations including Red Hat, Novell, Google and Firefox are including Ogg Theora and Vorbis support. Even Microsoft includes Ogg Vorbis in some of their products. It's really high time, Nokia started endorsing Ogg and including support out of the box to meet their customers demands. Not only did they not do that, they went ahead and derailed Ogg Theora support in HTML 5 by calling it proprietary. Totally ridiculous and unacceptable behaviour.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nokia-to-w3c-ogg-is....

Actual Ogg Support

Posted Oct 19, 2009 18:59 UTC (Mon) by divide_by_zero (guest, #60957) [Link]

In the previous tablets there was ogg-support, but just to play given files. The metadata-crawler cannot read ogg tags, though, so there is no easy way to access your ogg files from the mediplayer. No sorting by album, artist, etc. (You can hack the DB though.)

Dissatisfied users asked for the opening of the code of the player and the crawler so we could really integrate ogg into the system, but it won´t happen for whatever reason. What I heard is that for Fremantle Nokia created a totally new and more open player and a metadata DB system, even based in a popular FLOSS program I am not familiar with. I hope ogg users won´t face the same problem in the N900, then...

As for being official or not, I'm not personally concerned. As I understand, the freedom fight stops when users are allowed to fix the system. We can't ask Nokia to be ogg enthusiasts and push it to the uninformed users.

One other concern that exists is whether the ogg codec has access to the same resources the other official ones have. If we can't make an ogg decoder use some specialized and closed DSP chip while the wma decoder can, that's reason to get angry. I'm not sure if that happens in the N900. I remember a discussion once where a Nokia person said that while that was true, the implementation of a non-official ogg decoder could still be made better than the official, closed and privileged alternatives... (Sorry for the excess of uncertain statements. :] )