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Posts: 634 | Thanked: 3,266 times | Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia
#33
Originally Posted by freemangordon View Post
@wicket - We'll definitely appreciate your help, there are tasks that need more thinking than coding (fixing the spaghetti fremantle boot process is for example), so even if you lack time to do programming, your experience will help a lot.
As you've probably already noticed, I've been adding comments to the GitHub issues where I feel I my input might be useful. The spaghetti Fremantle boot process might be interesting. I'll take a look at what Leste is currently doing to bring up Hildon and get back to you on that one.

Originally Posted by freemangordon View Post
Not sure what your vision about free mobile linux is, however what we aim is a device independent distro, to the extent that's possible given that usually each device needs it's own kernel. Though that seems to change with DT. And by device independent, we don't only aim ARM world - actually most of the development so far was done in amd64 VM that boots to hildon-desktop in exactly the same way n900 or allwinner does.

Having such a base we can strip lots of fat, in terms of scratchbox for example.
My vision of free mobile Linux is to start off with a solid base. By this I mean build off mainline Linux and build on top of an existing mainstream distro. When starting out small, it's the only sustainable way of keeping it up to date and to ensure that security fixes are delivered in a timely manner. Leste is the first mobile Linux to get this right. postmarketOS half got it right but it's more focused on being an after-market OS for Android devices where mainline Linux is a secondary goal.

I'm actually less concerned about the GUI. Hildon is obviously a welcome addition. We need a GUI anyway.

I wanted to create a device independent mobile Linux base, based the above ideas. My plan was to create a free version and a non-free version. The non-free version would be something somewhat similar to Leste and would include blobs needed to make it as functional as possible. The free version would obviously be less functional but in the case of the N900 for example, all that would be missing would be video acceleration, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

I think there is a need for a mobile OS that can be 100% vetted and this can only be done with free software. The US has virtually complete control all mobile operating systems and I'm surprised this sits well with most countries. I often wonder what kind of mobile phones are issued by non-US governments to their officials. It seems that only the Russians were smart enough to realise the problem. They funded some ex-Nokia employees to make a certain OS well known to this forum . Unfortunately they don't want to share all of it with the rest of the world and most ports are stuck with Android kernel forks.

You've seen my list of mainline Linux devices. My next list will be of SoCs used in modern phones which already have mainline support but no device support other than dev/evaluation boards. A lot of people are unaware how much work has already been done in mainline. Like I said in my previous post, I want too try to encourage contributions and it might help if more people knew they would not need to start from scratch.

That's the basis of my vision. I could elaborate more but that's a discussion for another day.

Originally Posted by freemangordon View Post
Wizzup can elaborate on the the build system (jenkins) , but I think it is more or less functional and stable.
I found the image-builder and jenkins-integration repos on GitHub so I'll see if I can figure it out.

Originally Posted by freemangordon View Post
So, please join ##fptf-private, at least to see how is the cooperation going on .
I've not had a chance to talk on Freenode yet, I can probably get on there tomorrow.
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DebiaN900 - Native Debian on the N900. Deprecated in favour of Maemo Leste.

Maemo Leste for N950 and N9 (currently broken).
Devuan for N950 and N9.

Mobile devices with mainline Linux support - Help needed with documentation.

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
 

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