What Maemo was, and what you can still do with it
Maemo was Nokia’s Debian based Linux operating system for handhelds, shipped on five devices between November 2005 and November 2009, built around the Hildon interface on GTK+ and an ordinary apt and dpkg userland underneath it.
That description is the whole of it, and it is why the platform still has readers. A Maemo device was a Linux computer with a phone attached rather than a phone with Linux hidden inside it. The root filesystem held the same directory layout as a Debian workstation, packages arrived as .deb files, and a terminal was one install away. Nokia shipped four generations of internet tablet under the names OS2005, OS2006, OS2007 and OS2008, then one phone, the N900, running Maemo 5. After that the line was renamed twice and passed out of Nokia’s hands entirely.
What the name Maemo means in English
The name Maemo carries no published meaning in English. Nokia used it as a coined product name, styled it in lower case in its own branding and developer documentation, and never glossed it. What the names do encode is the release codenames, all of which are winds: Mistral, Scirocco, Gregale, Bora, Chinook, Diablo, Fremantle and Harmattan. The marketing names and the version numbers ran in parallel, so OS2008 and Maemo 4 are the same thing, and the codename Fremantle and the number Maemo 5 are the same thing again. The full mapping of version, codename, date and hardware is set out in every Maemo release and the device it shipped on, because the two naming schemes are the single most common source of confusion in old forum threads.
Two things Maemo was not: it was not Symbian, which was Nokia’s other and much larger platform, and it was not a Linux distribution you were meant to install yourself. Nokia shipped it preinstalled and supported flashing only back to its own images.
How the Debian userland worked on the device
The Debian userland worked on these devices the way it works on a desktop. dpkg installed packages, apt resolved dependencies, and the Hildon Application Manager was a touch sized front end over the same apt configuration in /etc/apt. Adding a repository added a line to a sources list. Nothing about the packaging was special to handhelds except the architecture, armel, and the small root partition.
Community software reached users through a three stage promotion path that Nokia hosted but the community ran:
- Extras-devel took whatever a developer uploaded to the autobuilder, unfiltered and unsafe by design.
- Extras-testing held candidates while testers voted on them in the maemo.org quality assurance queue.
- Extras held the packages that had passed that vote, and was the only one of the three enabled by default.
The Application Manager hid its advanced behaviour behind a mode the community called red pill, reached by typing a specific string into the new catalogue dialogue. Red pill exposed system packages, downgrade options and the raw repository list, and it is the reason so many N900s were bricked by people who enabled Extras-devel and then ran an unattended upgrade.
Root access differed by generation, which matters if you are handed one of these devices with no password. Maemo 5 on the N900 sets no root password at all: you install the rootsh package and use sudo gainroot, or you set a password yourself with passwd. On the earlier tablets, a unit flashed into Nokia’s research and development mode accepted the root password rootme over SSH, which is exactly as insecure as it sounds and was never meant to leave a lab.
The devices Maemo ran on, from the 770 to the N900
The devices Maemo ran on were four tablets without cellular radios and one phone. All five used an 800×480 screen, which was an unusual amount of resolution for a handheld at the time, and all five used a resistive digitiser meant for a stylus or a fingernail rather than a fingertip.
| Device | Announced | Release at launch | Screen | Processor | RAM | Cellular |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nokia 770 | May 2005 | OS2005 (Maemo 1) | 4.13in, 800×480, resistive | TI OMAP 1710 at 252 MHz | 64 MB | None, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth only |
| Nokia N800 | January 2007 | OS2007 (Maemo 3, Bora) | 4.13in, 800×480, resistive | TI OMAP 2420 | 128 MB | None |
| Nokia N810 | October 2007 | OS2008 (Maemo 4, Chinook) | 4.13in, 800×480, resistive, slide out keyboard | TI OMAP 2420 at 400 MHz | 128 MB | None, adds GPS |
| Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition | 2008 | OS2008 (Maemo 4) | As N810 | As N810 | 128 MB | WiMAX, no GSM |
| Nokia N900 | August 2009 | Maemo 5 (Fremantle) | 3.5in, 800×480, resistive, slide out keyboard | TI OMAP 3430, Cortex-A8 at 600 MHz | 256 MB plus 768 MB swap | GSM and 3G |
The Nokia N900 is the device most people mean when they say Maemo, and it is the odd one out in the table: it went on sale in November 2009 with 32 GB of internal storage, a 5 megapixel camera, a three row hardware keyboard and a 1320 mAh BL-5J battery. Its browser, MicroB, ran Mozilla’s Gecko engine with Flash preinstalled, which meant a handheld rendering desktop pages with a desktop engine in 2009. Nokia removed the charge for voice guided navigation in Ovi Maps in January 2010, and the N900 carried a Maemo build of it.
How the N900 compared with the N97 and the N8
The N900 compared with the N97 and the N8 on hardware and lost on software support, which is the short version of Nokia’s problem in those two years. All three were flagship class, all three had a 3.5in screen, and only one of them ran Linux.
| Model | On sale from | Operating system | Screen | RAM | Storage | Keyboard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nokia N97 | June 2009 | Symbian S60 5th Edition | 3.5in, 640×360, resistive | 128 MB | 32 GB plus microSD | Slide out QWERTY |
| Nokia N900 | November 2009 | Maemo 5 | 3.5in, 800×480, resistive | 256 MB plus 768 MB swap | 32 GB plus microSD | Slide out QWERTY |
| Nokia N8 | Late 2010 | Symbian^3 | 3.5in, 640×360, capacitive AMOLED | 256 MB | 16 GB plus microSD | None, on screen only |
The N900 had the sharper panel of the three, at 800×480 across 3.5in, or roughly 267 pixels per inch. It also had the smaller application catalogue by a wide margin, because Symbian software from the Ovi Store did not run on Maemo and never would have: different kernel, different toolkit, different packaging. Buying an N900 in 2009 meant choosing a platform with one phone on it.
What replaced Maemo: MeeGo, Harmattan and Sailfish OS
Maemo was replaced twice over. In February 2010, at Mobile World Congress, Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo, merging Maemo with Intel’s Moblin under the Linux Foundation and switching the core to RPM packaging. The next Nokia device in the line, the N9 of 2011, did not actually ship that core: it ran the platform developed as Maemo 6 Harmattan, Debian packaged and Qt based, released under the name MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Nokia announced its move to Windows Phone in February 2011, and the MeeGo effort was wound down.
The technical continuation went two ways. Mer rebuilt the MeeGo core as a community project, and Jolla, founded by former Nokia staff, built Sailfish OS on top of it; the first Jolla phone reached buyers in Finland at the end of 2013, and Sailfish OS is still developed and shipped. The other continuation went back to the Hildon side of the family and is described in Maemo Leste, the continuation.
What still runs on an N900
Several alternatives still run on an N900, and none of them are Nokia’s. Maemo 5 itself was kept alive by the Community Seamless Software Update, or CSSU, which continued patching Fremantle after Nokia’s last firmware update in October 2010 and shipped in stable and testing variants. Alongside it, kernel-power replaced the stock kernel with one exposing extra features and frequencies.
- Maemo Leste rebuilds the Hildon desktop on Devuan and targets the N900 among other ARM devices.
- Easy Debian ran a full Debian chroot beside Maemo 5 so desktop applications could be used on the device.
- NITDroid ported Android of the 2.x era to the N900 as a second bootable system.
- Kali Linux and its predecessor BackTrack published ARM images for a small set of devices in their early releases, and the N900 was among them, though later Kali releases dropped it.
Battery life is the practical limit on all of this. The N900 takes a 1320 mAh BL-5J, a cell that has not been manufactured in original form for many years, and a device that idles poorly under a custom operating system will not last a working day whatever the software promises.
This is an independent reference. It is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the Maemo Freak blog that published news at this domain between 2009 and 2015. It hosts no firmware, no ROM images and no repackaged applications, and it links to none; the projects named here distribute their own.