[Pkg-n900-maint] Fwd: Do you have a lot of free time and an urge to contribute mobile phone packaging to Debian?

[Timo Jyrinki]

FYI to this pretty silent list as well.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com>
Date: 2011/10/20
Subject: Do you have a lot of free time and an urge to contribute
mobile phone packaging to Debian?
To: debian-arm at lists.debian.org


Hi,

The title says it mostly. There is a lot of work to be done on
hardware adaptation / kernel support, middleware (FSO2 / oFono) and UI
(SHR, Mer/Nemo/MTF, Aurora) regarding mobile phones. For a few devices
it's mostly taking code from upstream and packaging.

Why I'm asking it more precisely is that I have a spare Nokia N900,
for which there is now basic, probably untested support in fso-deviced
[1] and related packages. What would be needed on that middleware
level is similar to fso-common's [2] fso-gta01/fso-gta02 meta packages
for Neo 1973 / Neo FreeRunner phones, polished together with its
dependencies so far that the apt-get install fso-n900 would bring the
phone functionalities online (then apt-get install some UI and off you
go). This of course assumes that first you have a kernel from
somewhere and otherwise normal Debian armel/armhf rootfs - which
brings one next into packaging the hardware adaptation for OMAP3/N900
into Debian. UIs are common ground with other Debian mobile phoners,
like the pkg-fso team [3] which you should probably anyway join to
contribute to FSO packages. Finally, remember to check out the recent
Mobile UXes BoF report [4], which should be updated with the fact that
MeeGo is now called Mer on the community side and MeeGo CE - the
OMAP3/N900/N950/N9 hw adaptation and handheld UX project - is now
called Nemo.

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fso-deviced.html
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fso-common.html
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianFSO
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/09/msg00126.html

I have too many devices and I'd like to give the N900 to someone who
wants to make a difference in this area in Debian and also work in the
upstream projects Mer/Nemo (home of the hw adaptation [5], and MTF
based handheld ux), upcoming Tizen (the actual continuation of MeeGo)
et cetera. What I lack is free time. The N900 would come with stock
PR1.3 maemo software, but with u-boot readily installed so you can
boot up Debian from microSD card. It is also possible to consider how
to use the 256MB NAND and the 2GB eMMC. There is some previous work
done or investigated already regarding Debian on N900, see [6] for
details (the modem support should now be in both FSO2 and oFono).

[5] http://monster.tspre.org:2082/Mer%3a/Trunk%3a/Adaptations%3a/N900/Mer_Trunk_Base_armv7hl_standard/src/
[6] http://elektranox.org/n900/todo.html

-Timo