Dear Wookey, and Dear Colleagues, 2013-08-27 1:29 GMT+02:00 Wookey <woo...@wookware.org>: > +++ 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. >
Wiki updating is too much time consuming, however I can give tipps on how to install on many devices, pda,... html/php is out of current question currently for me. I can tell how I install debian by email, and one could update the page directly. > >> I would say that Handhelds (and also older computers) are the future way >> to go for Debian. > Maintaining OPIE would be too much work, and I haven't the sufficient number of hours for such a large project. > 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). I would be very pleased to help and contribute even more Debian. > > 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. If you would like, Wookey, I could give you debs for some of the applications from nframe-os, as a contrib or non-free. You can check the wide array of applications based on ncurses and nframe-os. nframe-os is extremely tiny (lightweight), since it requires only ncurses and almost no libs (just few, e.g. signal,netbase). It does everything itself (which demanded many years of dev). There are really a bunch applications and actually very nice ones. http://ncursespim.scienceontheweb.net/nframe-os.htm If you are interested, I would like also to maintain xlockmore (version 5.37). I would like to have a deb for testing/sid (or stable someday) since in my opinion, xlockmore is far far too heavy. xlockmore is my favorite. I know the probs with xlockmore. Sad, because I always like this tiny app. Best wishes Wookey Yours sincerely, Pat' -- Another Debian User, since many many years, maybe from potato > > 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: https://lists.debian.org/cap-hyssufenn7vhytr5tewz4eyxo5g0u7aqd2aaf-1nb2-v...@mail.gmail.com
