The excerpt below is from the December 10th edition of the Debian Project News newsletter. It's a report on how feasible they think it will be to get Debian to run on smartphones.
It cites the high quantity of non-mainline kernel patches as the big obstacle. I thought sometime in 2012 we heard that Google finally cooperated with the kernel developers and had all the Android-specific changes merged into the main kernel. But I suppose that only accounts for the generic, platform-wide changes, and not all the hardware-specific changes made by device manufacturers. -Tom Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis --------------------------------------------- Paul Wise documented how to install Debian on smartphones [11]: while this is technically possible, the process is complicated by the fact that the Linux mainline kernel doesn't run on many mobile devices and the Debian Linux kernel maintainers prefer not to include non-mainline patches. Paul concluded by saying that "the procedures I documented above are not a great way to support mobile devices at all and could break at any moment anyway. So everyone, please become a kernel developer and help merge all of the many many versions of Android Linux into Linux mainline so that you can have your favourite distribution on your devices". The state of the art of support for running Debian on such devices is documented on the Mobile wiki page [12], while people interested in helping can join the discussion on the debian-mobile mailing list [13] or simply join the #debian-mobile channel on irc.debian.org. 11: http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/ 12: http://wiki.debian.org/Mobile 13: http://lists.debian.org/debian-mobile/ _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
