N900 may be able to achieve USB host mode after all
Ian Stirling and Joerg Reisenweber have been collaborating on a wiki page which suggests that USB "host mode" may be achievable on the N900 after all. The N8x0 allowed, through the USB On-The-Go (OTG) specification, the use of USB peripherals such as keyboards, mice, USB sticks and external hard drives. However, the N900 was released after the mobile phone manufacturers started standardising on charging through Micro-USB ports. This, according to Nokia, meant that switching to host mode was "impossible". Further research has shown, though, that the necessary pin which isn't wired up is used to indicate - rather than control - the mode: It seems that host-mode can be made to work - [there is] a report on a n900 detecting some USB peripherals. (though not having drivers for them - which is just simple compilation). A USB OTG controller would normally switch between host and device mode (initially) using the ID pin, to detect if it's at the A or B-side of a OTG cable. [...] So, if the kernel can be altered to ignore this pin - which should be trivial if there is host mode support for the chip in the kernel - then host mode works.
N8x0 community updates site is now live to pick up where Nokia left Diablo
After what's seemed like years of discussion, the community - thanks to a push by Lucas Maneos - has finally got in place the infrastructure to provide Seamless Software Updates (SSUs) to Maemo 4 (Diablo); which powers the N8x0 devices. The repository, which requires a small package to be installed to configure the Application Manager, contains updates to a number of packages; including the kernel, desktop, X Terminal, Application Manager, PDF reader and more.
Why PR1.2 has been delayed
Eero Tamminen, one of Nokia's principal Maemo engineers, has outlined some of the reasons why the forthcoming update to Maemo 5, PR1.2, has been delayed: As one example, when we optified some of the rootfs content to make more space on it (for SSUs), we had to deal with the slowdowns coming from those packages being now on eMMC (which is slower than rootfs especially when the device is swapping). This required quite a lot of iteration on what to optify, SSU issues, policy & memory locking finetuning, otherwise optimizing slow things etc. With the lengthy gap between the release of the SDK and the firmware itself, the fact that some regressions had been encountered was obvious. However, it's interesting to see some of the detail about those regressions and the impact they've had.