Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

As we all know Maemo5 is little be outdated and will rust every day more and more. But Maemo5 is good OS and N900 is still very good (/the best) device.

I found several discussions about rebasing Maemo5 to the newer Debian, most notably: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=534096&postcount=3 (but without chrooting and dual booting) and http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=43188 (but newer debian, and allowing squeeze packages to depends squeeze packages).

I have a dream: N900 running stock new Debian, recompiled for N900, with bunch of Maemo/Hildon packages and as little as possible closed source Nokia packages.

I started to compile Debian 6.0 (squeeze) on Maemo5 toolchain. Seems very first needed is newer dpkg, 1.15.8.13 (done). I also think that squeeze must be done before wheezy (I mean we can't skip straight to the wheezy).

I'm currently setting up sbdmock (http://wiki.maemo.org/Building_packages_with_sbdmock) for Maemo5 (http://cc.oulu.fi/~rantalai/maemo5/squeeze/maemo5.cfg).

I'm figuring out optification and I think most clean way is to change /usr to the /dev/mmcblk0p2. Will this solve whole optification?

Here is my current (high risk) situation: http://cc.oulu.fi/~rantalai/maemo5/squeeze/

Testing:
[EDIT]
There are now also repo for wheezy:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/rantalai...5/wheezy/repo/

You need newer apt-get to use it, because of some http-redirecting magic.
[EDIT]

So what you think? Do you share my dream? Is this something CSSU could do? Or will this fit better for Hildon Foundation? For sure I know this is not for extras.

I have always wanted to do this. I've always dreamed it. But I don't have the skills. But yes, I support you.

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

Great project! keep it up!

Afaik this was not done in maemo, because it hurts performance a lot (correct me, if I am wrong ...).

Have you considered building the packages with the thumb-enabled linaro toolchain? This should save you some rootfs space and increase the performance as well

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

Would it be better to go down the meego/nemo route of putting the whole OS on microsd card?

This way you could get away with not optifying things, as you have as much space as you need. Apparently the performance of the emmc isn't that great, and when you factor in the limited number of write cycles flash memory has, everything on microsd might be the best way forward. You could then use a bigger Compcache to improve performance.

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

If you want still use udev, then you must have / and /usr on same partition.

So rather prepare system image for SD card, not for internal n900 nand.

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

Next, you need to create list of all packages on n900 and write which package is upstream, which upstream + nokia specified patches and which are nokia's packages. Obviously you cannot remove nokia specified patches...

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

And if you want help with something I can help you, ping me on IRC. But I do not have time for this project which sounds very very good :-)

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

And when compiling new packages, use thumb2 toolchain, not old which is default in scratchbox for maemo5...

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

do you have a package list of debian packages to be rebuild on m5 ?
I've been doing similar on m6 and soon 1000 projects are rebuilding ...

Re: Rebasing Maemo5 top of the Debian 6.0
 

stupid layman question:
why do you think going straight for Wheezy is not an option?