Re: Support for Freerunner?
On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 6:00 AM, Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> Until June I've used my Neo Freerunner with QtMoko. Then anti-crime law
> banned anonymous SIMs and I decided that connectivity wasn't worth the
> weight in my pocket anymore. Then I watched Denver Gingerich's talk at
> Libreplanet about the alternatives to baseband. He suggests that a
> Freerunner running Debian is one of the best options for a pocket
> computer.
The OsmocomBB project isn't suitable for end-users yet, it is only for
protocol researchers at this point.
The other firmware that is available is for the FR baseband is based
on leaked proprietary source code.
Also, 2G is being turned off in various places around the world and is
a pretty insecure protocol at this point.
http://osmocom.org/projects/security/
> Seeing as I got one of those that still works (it's only 10 years old
> after all) it would be a shame to waste it. I found that the software
> didn't boot anymore, so I put the last version of QtMoko on the SD
> again. Now my main use case is to get some kind of communication going
> over wifi. The SIM unlock screen that QtMoko presents me with is
> useless and I'd rather see it running something like Ring, or at least
> XMPP chat if resources are too limited.
Sadly the pre-installed WiFi firmware on the FR is a beta version that
is quite buggy and OM never released the (proprietary) flasher for
that firmware and I expect it would be very hard to find a firmware
update. Consequently you will have to deal with an unreliable WiFi
connection.
> Does anyone have current information about running Debian on a
> Freerunner?
This device is pretty much abandoned. There is no mainline u-boot,
Linux or mesa support. Due to the lack of mainline Linux kernel
support, you probably won't be able to run current systemd or glibc.
Due to armel being due to be dropped soonish (or the baseline bumped
to ARMv5), you probably won't be able to run any release past stretch.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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