Re: Call for Help: Debian mobile BoF at DebConf
On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 06:13:16PM -0500, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> > There are probably many more things going on.
> > Please, post them here and/or tell us at the BoF!
>
> Don't forget the Gemini PDA which reportedly also runs Debian as an option
> (though I have not seen one yet).
I have one. Alas, that "Debian" is a bad joke: it relies on an Android
partition to even boot, requires a vendor kernel with plenty of drivers.
There's a source to that kernel, but you need a lot of blobby userspace
sourceless drivers as well, and those can't even be installed themselves but
require a running Android installation that's accessed via libhybris.
These drivers have a bunch of hardcoded uids and gids in the range used by
unmodified Debian, thus you can't even have sane chroots/containers -- would
need to replicate all the extra steps every time.
I for one don't even get sleep on close, basic power management or working
brightness adjustment, but most people report those work for them. Even
reflashing to a pristine vendor image doesn't seem to help for me, though.
That makes battery life extremely short.
The hardware itself is pretty adequate, though. Keyboard is too big for
in-hands use (at which N900 excelled) but is more like a micro-laptop.
Only space has problems registering presses not in the middle, but that's
probably a matter of getting used to. USB connectivity is nice: you get two
USB C ports; I haven't seen a native USB C peripheral in my life but with
an USB A-to-C adapter devices I tried work fine.
Meow!
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