On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 5:16 PM, giovanni_re
<john_re@fastmail.us> wrote:
Let's start the "Debian distro for Android capable hardware phones".
What are the first steps we can easily take, to get started on this?
1) Talk about how to do it on this email list.
2) Put something on www.debian.org web page about beginning to work on
this project.
3) Create a mailing list for "Debian for Android Hw".
4) Send some thoughts in reply to this email, & to the new mailing list.
5) Make a wiki page for "Debian distro for Android capable hardware
phones".
- http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnHandhelds
first, nice research. i'd like a hardware linux kernel on a phone because i don't like java and i'd love to get these devices to do cool things (these are great, cheap little computers that i can almost afford to throw around).
so, here's where i'd go:
boot loader - someone put android on an iphone a while ago. you should go look at that code and figure out how it should be modified. android based hardware should be more open (just because of the type of community). however, it might be possible to bypass this step and use the android boot loader or something someone else has programmed to load roms - donno.
kernel - you're going to need to figure out the differences between kernel options between the upstream linux and android. then figure what you need for your linux and what you just can't have because of the hardware.
drivers - you'll probably want to start out with just the wifi driver. that way you could get in with ssh and see what you have. after this, a video driver would be very useful. then you might want a bluetooth network and stack along with a keyboard driver. etc
applications - if you want to use this for more than a tethered box (this is beyond my use case) you'll need some apps. i don't know how far gtk or qt (or tk) have gotten with touch screen pointers and gesture. however, assuming they have, you'll need an on screen keyboard (shouldn't be too hard). then you'll need to customize your apps - you're not going to want your web browser to pop up with an inch worth of toolbar crap for instance.
now, i know i can probably help with the application stuff. i might be able to figure out some driver programming. however, i'd be completely lost at the boot loader level (i don't speak asm).