The curse of Maemo — closed source components

Three months ago I wrote post about situation of my Nokia 770 tablet. Today I looked how situation looks with non-Maemo systems.

Flashed recent Poky Linux build. Device booted into nice Sato desktop which I am familiar with. As it was expected — no WiFi support in base system. Why? Licensing problem.

Nokia tablets WiFi stack in implemented by:

We also use 2.6.18 kernel from OS2007 instead of 2.6.16.27 from OS2006. With some hacking on “umac.ko” module from 2.6.16.27 + patching “cx3110x” driver I got module which loads on my device. But then other problem appeared — WPA Supplicant is unable to connect to WiFi interface due to lack of wireless extensions support. And Nokia implementation is closed source :(

On IRC I got information that there is a patch which adds WE18 support into cx3110x driver. Fetched, applied but situation is the same:

[ 7206.999359] umac: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 7210.030334] CX3110x chip variant: STLC4370
[ 7210.319458] CX3110x: firmware version: 2.13.0.0.a.13.14
[ 7210.319580] Loaded CX3110x driver, version 0.8
root@nokia770:~# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device

and then reboot :(

So it looks like my 770 will get Maemo OS2006 again and will end it’s life as console for simple games + music player. Too bad that it hard to make it work with other systems.

BTW: I wonder why Maemo.org forbids GoogleBot… It is really hard to find Maemo related things with Google :(

UPDATE: Niels Breet (X-Fade on #maemo) pointed me to maemo webdevs discussion which clarify that GoogleBot index Maemo websites. My fault — sorry guys. It is hard to find current informations in wiki but there are plans to move to MediaWiki and reorganize content.

nokia poky