+++ patrick295767 patrick295767 [2013-08-26 12:34 +0200]: > Hello, > I wonder what's Debian position in regards to installations on Handhelds. > Over the years, I have installed/contributed in installing Debian on > various handheld machines, including�for instance HP Jornadas (Sarge - > archive), Psion Revo, Psion 5mx, ... armel, and finally the best of best > the Pandora. (The default OS of the Pandora is Angstrom). > As shown, Debian can be readily installed on various platforms / machines, > even with a very limited hardware.
This is true, although debian installer and kernel supprt for most of these machines has been poor/missing. > My question is as follows: > �- Have we missed something? Publicity?� > - How to fix that? A temptative... One very useful resource is the Wiki.debian.org/DebianOn<machine> pages. There are loads of things Debian will install on that do not have a page there, and it would enormously help others. Debian-installer support is another really useful thing. For a long time we were hampered by the fact that parted had no support for flash-only devices, and D-I depended on parted. These days nearly everything has something that looks like a block device and parted has got smarter so this is largely no longer a blocker. Making stuff 'just work' in D-I and kernel support would be a great contribution. > I believe that Debian shall also propose more packages that are suited to > terminals, maybe to show that we can run Debian and have also lightweight > fast X11 applications. More publicity on lightweight applications? More > terminal applications in our repos? > OPIE / GPE (in particular GPE added to our repos) are also a point for > having Debian for Handelds. We've had GPE in debian for may years, but not well-maintained. Taking care of that would be great if you are interested in it. > I believed we might lack of publicity on own easily Debian is installable > on handhelds. > Debian can be installed very light. This is true but the results are often less than ideal due to missing bits of UI. We could really use people doing _actual work_ to make this better. I'd hesitate to recommend it to many users without some more work to take off some of the rough edges (unless things have improved greatly since last time I looked about a year ago). > And more recently, how manage with ARMs?� > [1]http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/linus-torvalds-threatens-to-cut-off-arm This is old news and has been essentially sorted by linaro (and others). The new(ish) multi-device support will make our lives as a distro much easier as we don't have to build loads of different kernels to get reasonable device coverage. > Another example on publicity, is our webpage (wiki) is out-dated (well it > is difficult to keep all up to date). > [2]https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnHandhelds It a wiki - please update it. > I would say that Handhelds (and also older computers) are the future way > to go for Debian. Well, one aspect. Many of us still want to use it on new and non-mobile hardware too, but I agree it is underappreciated in this area, and it's an increasingly important area. This stuff is co-ordinated on the debian-mobile list. Please join there if you haven't already. We could really use more people doing actual work to make things better - much of which isn't actually hard (updating wiki pages, flash-kernel and D-I support for more devices, updating handheld-relevant packages). Lots of people are 'interested' in this are, but I'm not aware of much actual work being done. A bit of action could well generate quite a lot more interest. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130826232933.gw1...@stoneboat.aleph1.co.uk
