Cordia Tab hardware hits a roadblock with Chinese manufacturers' lack of respect for GPL

Due to some unfortunate GPL violations by tablet hardware OEMs, the Cordia Tab project has found itself without a viable hardware supplier: Searching for other manufacturers brought the same result as my previous attempts – every single manufacturer doesn’t care a button for GPL conditions and keeps the modified Linux kernel secret. We cannot use the binary kernel provided for the Android build, as it lacks crucial features like devtmpfs and cgroups support. More importantly it locks us from any future upgrades – we need to be able to forward-port features to newer kernels. It is too bad an interesting start-up project can find itself so quickly without a product because manufacturers chose to ignore requirements of free software licenses.

H-E-N9 USB hostmode enabler N9

Via: @fiferboy

Editor: Andrew Olmsted

Joerg Reisenweber has taken the first steps to getting USB Host Mode working on the N950 and N9. I succeeded in a first step towards USB host mode: finding out about charger chip and operating it in boost mode -> stable 5V supply to USB receptacle[...]It's well understood that there are still massive obstacles regarding loading of kernel modules and also regarding Pretty impressive work for having to probe and test assumptions about the inner workings of the hardware without proper datasheets.