Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

Hi Wizzup_

For sometime I've been working of my own mobile OS, initially with Debian on the N900 but more recently I've been reworking these scripts (not yet public) to run with Devuan and to separate out device specific config to make them multi-device, initially with support the N900 and Droid 4, and support for N950 and N9 coming shortly after. Unfortunately in the last few months I've been too busy with work and haven't had enough time to complete them. My general idea was to make them as generic as possible in order to produce basic image builds for a variety of devices by just specifying a defconfig and dts already present in mainline Linux. The idea behind this was that by having basic images for a variety of devices, even if untested, it might encourage new developers to try them and start contributing further hardware adaptations (bootloader config and mainline Linux). I've been tracking devices with mainline support here and keeping it up to date, although I still need to check if anything interesting has gone in since the merge window opened for Linux 4.16.

I've known about Maemo Leste for while now and I've been meaning to contact you. I don't know if my scripts would be useful to you. I haven't yet looked into how your builds are produced but it shouldn't require much effort to adapt my scripts to produce Maemo Leste builds should you be interested.

By any means, you can count on me to help out with Maemo Leste. I certainly would like to contribute to it. I have my own ideas about how a free mobile operating system should be produced and Maemo Leste is the first effort I've seen that aligns with most of them. Given my limited free time, it makes sense to join forces rather than continue with my one man effort. I could probably help with producing images for N950 and N9 which have seen significant progress recently in mainline (although I don't yet have an N9 for testing).

I'll try to reach out to you on Freenode sometime this week to discuss how I might be able to contribute. Otherwise, feel free to respond in this thread or by PM.

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

I've been thinking recently about how original N900 is, well, not so great because of bugs and lack of RAM. The alternative is to create new hardware (I know about Neo900...) and reducing bugs.

How far from here or fully ported maemo is to make it independent from omap architecture?

I would love to contribute but I don't know much about programming in Linux :(

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

@wicket - We'll definitely appreciate your help, there are tasks that need more thinking than coding (fixing the spaghetti fremantle boot process is for example), so even if you lack time to do programming, your experience will help a lot.

Not sure what your vision about free mobile linux is, however what we aim is a device independent distro, to the extent that's possible given that usually each device needs it's own kernel. Though that seems to change with DT. And by device independent, we don't only aim ARM world - actually most of the development so far was done in amd64 VM that boots to hildon-desktop in exactly the same way n900 or allwinner does.

Having such a base we can strip lots of fat, in terms of scratchbox for example.

Wizzup can elaborate on the the build system (jenkins) , but I think it is more or less functional and stable.

So, please join ##fptf-private, at least to see how is the cooperation going on :) .

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

In terms of getting a Virtualbox/VMWare image running, would I just do a minimal Devuan install and then add a custom repo to pull the packages or are they still only in git?

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

The actual packages also work on Allwinner ARM devices (apart from some device specific features in mce, but those can be ported/fixed), so we are already not necessarily dependent on omap.

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

Add the testing key from here: http://maedevu.maemo.org/

And then add the 'kawai' repo (we will soon rename that to leste again, we initially aimed for jessie with leste, and used kawai as temporary name for stretch/ascii, but now it's confusing).

Then install hildon-meta, but make sure that apt doesn't start services while installing (RUNLEVEL=1 apt-get install hildon-meta)

I think Parazyd is working on Vbox images, not sure how far he is, I think he is pretty close, he already has something that generates images for Devuan, so he just needs to add the Maemo Leste script(s).

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

Cool, nice list of devices with mainline support, we could try to extend our support for some of those devices given time and demand. Freemangordon has hildon-desktop, mce, dsme and all the other things on an Allwinner A33 tablet - similar to Q8 tablets I think.

Parazyd is doing the actual image building (also for Devuan, he's a devuan dev), and I've worked with him in setting up the Jenkins (auto)building and repository generation. It would be useful to see your scripts and see if/how we can use them to extend our builds.

Would love to join forces. I don't have either a N9 or N950, so that'd be a great addition. I'm "Wizzup" on Freenode, but we're also in #maemo-leste and ##fptf-private - our dev channel (might move all of it to #maemo-leste or #maemo at some point, just takes time to sort these things :))

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

Nice work! Would be great to see if you could work together with postmarketOS as well as they are moving in the same direction, and have a large list of ported devices.

Also, will maemo-leste support the existing applications on the community repository?

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

Running an updated kernel, glibc etc it would be interesting to see if there are any performance gains over Fremantle. Due to current graphics stack Todo items and lack of some components like the telephony stack a benchmark test wouldn't be fair to either variant.

I've know Dosbox was a lot faster after making use of some newer arm instructions (armv6 iirc).

Re: Maemo-Leste pre-alpha announcement
 

We've been collaborating on some points - they actively watch our bugtracker, and we watch theirs (to some degree :)). Personally, I think the goals might be different - from my pespective they seem to work on a lot of devices and offer a lot of choice, while our goal is "more simple" (in some sense), we want to offer the Maemo experience, first on the N900, and then on some other devices.

Additionally, I'm personally not satisfied with older vendor kernels, so I'd really want to push for a 'mainline only' (or very close to) policy. I believe postmarketOS is also pushing for this, but they (AFAIK, could be wrong) also ship various devices with Android kernels, I believe.

But others know more about pmOS. Both projects exist, and I think it's important that we collaborate. But don't expect Maemo Leste to switch to KDE plasma any time soon, so to say.