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Re: Poll - What Smartphone do you use?



shawn wilson wrote at 2011-05-03 10:55 -0500:
> On May 3, 2011 11:06 AM, "green" <greenfreedom10@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Probably the Nokia N810 does not count, considering it is not GSM or CDMA
> > capable.  And at this point it seems unlikely that Debian will ever run on
> > it.
> 
> Whaaaaat? Might want to Google again. IIRC, Nokia's phones were the closest
> to linux 5+ years before Apple or Google ever thought of making a phone. The
> n7xx, n8xx and n9xx should run most (if not all?) linux programs that can be
> compiled on an ARM.
> 
> IIRC, OS2008 was a port of debian.

I expected a response like this. ;)

By "run Debian" I mean actually run Debian armel.  I have run Debian and a 
linux-omap-2.6 kernel on the N810 in the past, but the battery drained fast, 
no GPS, no X, couldn't read internal mmc, audio problems, etc.  Basically, 
"it didn't work".  There are some howtos for running Debian or Ubuntu, but 
either they are chroots, or the required packages no longer exist.  Even 
using a Debian chroot has not worked for me, because I always use encryption 
for my files and neither LUKS/cryptsetup nor encfs work with the Maemo 
kernel.  I have spent a little time trying to rebuild the Maemo kernel, but 
the custom init stuff just makes it all more complicated, and I have not 
found a howto that includes rebuilding the initfs.

Or I could keep it simple and just say "running Debian means using mainline 
Linux".  I have been told that at least GPS and power management will likely 
never be supported by mainline.

I suppose the story is unfortunately the same with the N900.  I will not 
purchase one for "running Debian" unless I see real evidence of mainline 
support.
https://elektranox.org/n900/kernel/status.html

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