Hi Mayuresh, On 31/10/2020 03:46, Mayuresh wrote:
I have an (of course ancient) N900 in a bricked state. A dim Nokia logo flashes if switched on and it keeps rebooting. Expectation is to get only audio playback and wifi work so that I can put it to some use. With latest (or older) NetBSD is it possible to get it to work? Particularly wifi? If not any other suggestions Maemo or otherwise?
I worked on supporting the N900 back in the pre-6.x days (branch khorben-n900). I wrote a keyboard driver, but it never worked in -current because I was not allowed to let it interrupt on the i2c bus IIRC. You can refer to the talk I gave at BSDCan back in 2013 for more details:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2013/schedule/events/381.en.htmlIt is not clear to me at the moment if there is a driver readily available that would work for the wifi chip, or for the audio chip.
One reason I stopped working on the N900 myself was that it was very, very slow to boot to X at the time; also, the keyboard map under X was very wrong, which made it very difficult to debug at best (especially with no network).
With all of this said, there's been a looooot of progress since on NetBSD/evbarm and on support for OMAP, both for performance and for compatibility (eg support for FDT) so it should be worth investigating again. The keyboard driver is not magically going to work in spite of that, but there might be a cleaner way to register its interrupt line now. (hopefully)
PS: you will probably need to flash the bootloader of your N900 in order to be able to boot NetBSD on it. The tools required for that may not be easy to find anymore. Let me know if you need some help there.
Cheers & HTH, -- khorben