Re: Debian on Nokia N900?

[Victor Nitu <victor@debian-linux.ro>]

On 10/28/2011 12:22 PM, Jeremiah Foster wrote:

Apologies for being pedantic, but Maemo is really a "tablet" operating system, not a "smartphone" OS.

Please forgive my ignorance :)

Maemo is a Debian Derivative, so you can do lots of Debianesque things already.
Some of the software can be pulled from Maemo, but some of it is still closed unfortunately. There is more here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo_5_Developer_Guide/Architecture/Top_Level_Architecture

There are still a lot of peculiar things about Maemo. I want to free my ARM environment of dirty,
proprietary software, and try a nice GNU/Linux experience. I also want it to be fully functional as
a phone, so I begin looking more closely at grub structure, in the case I need dual-boot functionality.

I assume you're referring to "easy Debian." That is actually a pretty useful little package. I doubt it is causing as much battery drain as you imagine although surely some. The big battery hogs are things like wifi and GPS. If you have those on all the time your battery is pretty much only a few hours. At least that is the case with my battery

Yes, your guess was right. I don't like sophisticated solutions in response to simple problems.
Or maybe this is not that simple? I only see two variants: easy or fun.

This won't work sadly because there was no attempt on the part of Nokia to have a proper mapping between their releases "Fremantle", "Harmattan", etc and the Debian releases.

I don't trust their software, don't wanna use it. They are merely guests in the FLOSS world.

This will likely be harder than you imagine unfortunately. Nokia has changed a good deal of the low-level packages. I'd like to organize porting work to identify exactly what has changed and to port back patches but I have yet to find time. Your contribution towards this effort is of course very welcome. :-)

I just need to take some time and figure out what I need to do first. And set up some failure recovery policies :)

Some people complain that it takes a long time to read the Packages file when there are updates. Yes, udebs might help here, but if you want access to tens of thousands of software packages, you're going to have to be a bit patient as they come over the wire.

That's not the problem. They are complaining about the default software center, whatever its name would be,
if you pick your software updates and packages via apt-get is way better!

Then you're in for a lot of fun and frustration. :-) The N900 is a fabulous device to do embedded Linux development on since the CPU is well supported by Linaro and Debian and there are lots of tools and really smart folks on this dev list. You may end up bricking your N900 from time to time so I don't recommend using it as your primary telephone, though I know a lot of people that do.

Look a little closer at the maemo.org wiki and I think you'll find some useful information there too, specifically info about the maemo userland and flashing the device.

More (much more) information is available here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/09/msg00126.html

Godspeed!

You have given me a nice resource corner to hide in while learning my way to the ARM devices. At least for the beginning. Many many thanks.


Kind regards,

Victor