I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.

...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.

Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.

All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)

I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.

...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.

Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.

All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)

Someone not very technical wanting to bypass their government's mandated filtering?

As a LibreOffice user, I'm genuinely curious why you think this. I switched as I was sick of Oracle's meddling and Java-related issues, but I've found LO to be a much more pleasant product to use than OpenOffice, so I'd genuinely be appreciate if you'd elaborate why you feel OO is superior.

Kind of. The BBA is a bit of a rarity due to low home networking penetration back then, so no it didn't help it back then, but it might have done had it been a bit more commonplace.

I wonder if they filled the gaps in the gene sequences with DNA from dino-saaaaaurs...

I heard it was that Nintendo fucked up the contracts and realised at the last minute that they'd given Sony the rights for anything released on CDs, whilst they retained rights to anything released on carts. Given the way the market was clearly going, they realised they'd basically dropped the soap, so jumped out the shower and rather than "officially" cancelling the Play Station project, they switched to Phillips with some proper contracts and well...but this all took so long the numbers didn't add up...so no SNES CD, but those awful CD-i Zelda games did.

...which is why I've had to stop buying most games now that so many are using Steamworks. I cancelled my Aliens vs. Predator preorder when I found out, and now I won't be buying Aliens: Colonial Marines. Such a shame...but I refuse to have to ask permission to install software.

Reminds me of a similar problem with Latitude. Google never deemed Maemo worthwhile to get an official Google maps/Latitude client, so our only option is to use the horrible iPhone-targetted web-based nonsense. Yes, using the maps API decent enough 3rd party map clients have spring up, and they can even update our Latitude position, but there's no way to access your friends locations on said map as Google won't let you (we can't trust you, they say!). ...and as they won't make the software themselves, tough shit.

Annoys the hell out of me as I don't want an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone...but I have all the damn features on my old Symbian brick :(

I'm somewhat out of the loop with my protocols, so can anyone tell me what the advantages are of all the xDAV protocols over SyncML? That's the one bit of information I've been unable to find anywhere - e.g. why Apple decided CardDAV was required instead of just using SyncML, for example.

I was under the impression that they sorted this out very recently: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20600543

Depends entirely on your requirements of course, but what would be the problem with running a local Apache instance?

Only time it cropped up for me was when I had one slight hiccup and I had to fallback to XSL transforms on the server side when the client didn't support them (but still wanted to use them normally). I was able to quite easily write a protocol handler for PHP that implemented multiviews for local filesystem calls, and it works really nicely!

..or Apache multiviews using the content-accept header. :)

URLs should identify resources, not files anyway, so "/images/background10.jpg" should have the URL "/images/background10" anyway, then you're free to have multiple formats that can supply said resource on the server and vary depending on the client's preferences.

...I just wish Nokia had had more of a clue and made more of Maemo open so we could see it running on more devices. It's an awesome system...or at least the Debian bits are. The Nokia bits...less so. So much potential though.....