Today is #Nokia #N900 15th anniversary.

Nokia N900 was released on November 11th, 2009 and is one of the few last mobile Linux devices.

It is also the last device to be shipped with the Maemo operating system.

#mobilelinux #maemo

@danct12 ...and thanks to Maemo Leste project, you can still get updated software for it. And unlike original Maemo, this is actually opensource ;-).

@danct12 looks like a sidekick

@grimm @danct12 that comparison is going to make people angry 😂
(Since this thing was running a full Linux, and you could start OpenOffice on it, while the sidekick was basically a thin client and couldn't do anything fancy on its own)

@danct12 wait really?
…wait, 2009 was 15 years ago x.x

@danct12

What makes this Linux but Android not?

@Rhababerbarbar @danct12 Maemo was a regular Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, which Android is not.

@Rhababerbarbar @danct12 Mostly just different userland, so “Linux” in the sense of “Desktop Linux”. glibc vs bionic. X11 vs SurfaceFlinger. D-Bus vs Binder. Native binaries vs Dalvik/NDK. dpkg vs apk. upstart (iirc) vs Android init.

@danct12 #Nokia did a (soft) launch party for the #N900 at the BFI on the South Bank in London in September 2009.

lcuk had had a prototype, so we were able to do a cool demo: https://youtu.be/yk27PenpAz0

#RetroComputing #Maemo #MeeGo

_EDIT:_ I note wryly that Nokia's blog post about this is now on the #Microsoft website: https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2009/09/04/n900-to-appear-in-london-next-week/

@dos @Rhababerbarbar @danct12 Well, Maemo was Debian-based, but it was not quite usual. It contained lot of non-free stuff, for example. Still... more usual than Android, agreed.

@pavel @danct12 @Rhababerbarbar Sure, it wasn't even close to fully FLOSS and it had some creative partitioning and packaging hacks to fit things into NAND... but it was still a perfectly cromulent GNU/Linux distro. You can install plenty of proprietary crap on a Debian laptop as well:)

@pavel @danct12
Thank you for that reference, may try to resurrect an N800.

@guardeddon @danct12 I believe N800 resurrection will be significant work. N900 should be easier and more widely available...

@pavel @danct12
Yes, it appears the Maemo Leste doesn’t support the N800 ☹️
It was nice toy at the time. But of limited utility. A VoIP app worked but when out & about WiFi hot spots were often not spots.

@guardeddon @danct12 Look for Motorola Droid 4 or Nokia N900. Both should be cheap and easily available. Leste project was/is even giving some away...

@pavel @danct12
To be honest, I’d be happy to pass off the N800 somewhere/to someone but without some sort of contemporary OS support it’s just an ornament!

@guardeddon @danct12 Well, software is harder than hardware in this case. So I guess it is N800 to the museum, get something a bit newer to help with software :-).

@pavel @guardeddon It's also worth noting that the N800 is ARMv6 (I think with hardware fpu?) and some distros doesn't support anything below v7.