Archos 5 and 7 IMT hacking (last year’s generation) now officially enabled
Posted by Charbax on 27th November 2009
Thanks to Archos hacker archilles building up a nice amount of pressure over the last couple of months with the “guy fawkes hack” in our forums, and thanks to our many many requests over the past few years, Archos has decided to officially release a new Special Developer Edition Firmware based on Angstrom Linux generated from a customized open embedded build. See the PDF file: http://www.archos.com/corporate/press/press_releases/INFORMATION_DEVELOPERS.pdf
This firmware does void your warranty when installed, even if you later revert back to the normal firmware, so install it with precaution and check in the forums and in the wiki first for the latest status of this open source project before installing especially if you are a newbie.
Consider also, that Archos cannot support the full hardware acceleration of Multimedia playback in this Special Edition Firmware. At least that wouldn’t work yet in this initial proof of concept firmware released by Archos, so it is to be seen if there are open source and free tools that may or may not enable the DSP acceleration to playback up to 720p Mpeg4 Simple Profile, D1 H264, Mpeg2, Mp3, AAC, Flac, Ogg, WMV, WMA, WMV and more of the codecs that Archos for now only supports in the normal firmware.
My guess is that you may look forward to being able to run Android, Ubuntu, Qtopia, and Maemo Linux, even Chrome OS eventually, other than the Angstrom Linux of this proof of concept Hackers firmware.
You can discuss this in the Hackers forum: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewforum.php?f=34
When clicking to download this Angstrom Linux firmware at http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates.html you will be prompted by this message:
By pressing I agree, I hereby acknowledge that:
1. By installing the Special Developer Edition firmware on a device, it will forever loose the capability of playing DRM (digital right management) protected content even if I restore it later to a legacy ARCHOS firmware.
2. Installing the Special Developer Edition firmware is considered by ARCHOS as a voiding of the warranty and ARCHOS declines all liability or responsibility for any issues resulting from installing this Special Developer Edition firmware.
3. The Special Developer Edition firmware is provided under the entire responsibility of whomever installs it and this firmware is not supported by ARCHOS.
4. ARCHOS strongly advises that only experts in the domain of embedded software development may install and use this Special Developer Edition firmware.
5. This software is delivered “as is.” Archos does not assume any responsibility or liability regarding this Special Developer Edition firmware.
6. The Special Developer Edition firmware is an open source software and falls under the legal conditions of the Angstöm distribution (please see the editor of the Angström distribution for legal responsibilities http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/).
7. ARCHOS does not assume any responsibility or liability regarding the use of the device sold under its brand.
8. ARCHOS does not assume any responsibility or liability regarding any intellectual and industrial property rights such as, but not limited to, patents, trademarks, copyrights, mask works, or trade secrets.
Forum user EINSTEIN_ has posted a small rundown on the changes at http://archos.g3nius.org/index.php?title=What_does_the_Special_Developer_Edition_firmware_means_to_you%3F
If you want to see the Archos 5IMT hardware in action, you can watch my 5-part video review of the Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet that I released last year: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
On Amazon.com you can buy the Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet (250GB) for $199 and the Archos 7 Internet Media Tablet (160GB) for $209:
Found via archoslounge.net.
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