Hi Thibaut On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 03:27:54PM +0200, Thibaut Girka wrote: > Hi, > As you might know, I will soon be working on debian-installer support for the > Freerunner (and probably other "similar" devices) as a GSoC student[1]. > > Before starting the actual work, I would like to have your opinion on a few > points: > > 1°) µSD, yes, but NAND? > In any case, µSD will be supported, but do you think it is worthy to provide > support for Debian on the NAND? > It shouldn't be that hard, but I don't think there is any benefit in it, > since there is only 256MB available. I don't see any benefit. Also I doubt that you will be able to fit a regular (standard installation) Debian into 256MB. For NAND one of the emdebian flavours would be better suited.
> > 2°) What bootloader should be supported? Qi? U-Boot? Both? > The boot process slightly differs between Qi and U-Boot. > The installation process will use the ROM U-Boot (since it's available on any > FR, and provide useful things like DFU), > but once Debian is installed, it should be easier to use Qi. > What about U-Boot support? Is it really needed? Should we assume Qi is > installed on the NAND? > Or maybe install it ourselves (but this way sounds far too intrusive)? It would be good if the installer worked with whatever is already on the phone. For the start I would concentrate on u-boot because that's what's on the device from the factory. Manually installing Qi should be possible. Later it would be great if d-i autodetects the bootloader used on the device and configures anything accordingly. > > 3°) Which Desktop Environment should be the default? > Gnome is the default DE for a desktop installation of Debian, but it, of > course, isn't suitable for the FR. > I guess the main challengers are: > * XFCE: quite similar to Gnome, stable, usable, it has been in Debian for a > long time and there is already a task for it > * Illume: faster and finger-friendly, but much more experimental, and > available in unstable only > I'd say Illume. But I don't care that much. I think this needs to be part of the "phone task" for tasksel. > 4°) The phone suite > Well, after all, the FreeRunner is a phone. > A quick testing of Zhone, already available in Debian, shows that it seems > reliable and relatively fast. > However, it is really simple, and does not provide many features. > Then, do you use your FR as a phone? If yes, what software do you use? I think that the pkg-fso group agreed that they want to package SHR for Debian. But I might be mistaken on this. Gaudenz -- Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~ Samuel Beckett ~ _______________________________________________ pkg-fso-maint mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-fso-maint
