UPDATE: My PocketCHIP arrived today. I like the device itself. It's a little
bulky but fits in my jeans pocket. The keyboard works pretty well. I'd hate
to write a long document with it, but terminal commands are pretty painless.
Fingers don't work very well with the touch screen, but a pencil eraser works
well as a stylus. The pencil stand thing (photo attached) looks silly but is
actually kind of convenient.
Now I would like to liberate it as best as possible, replace the desktop
environment with something less awful, and configure it for email, chat, and
SIP.
These are the freedom issues brought up in this thread so far:
(1) WiFi firmware is nonfree, but can be avoided with a USB adapter.
(2) GPU firmware is nonfree, but can be deleted as I do not require advanced
graphics.
(3) The bootloader is nonfree. A free one apparently exists, but I do not
have the knowledge to find it and replace the nonfree one. Can anyone help
out or link to a resource?
(4+?) Is anyone aware of other issues?
The home screen of the default DE (photo attached) contains six launchers,
out of which only the terminal and file system will ever be useful. It would
be nice to replace the DE entirely with something I can customize. According
to this thread I should at least be able to install xfce4, and I do see some
packages related to xfce4 when I run $ apt-cache search . but I get E: unable
to load package xfce4 when I try to install it. When I run $ sudo apt-get
update it looks like it attempts to update
- http://opensource.nextthing.co jessie
- http://security.debian.org jessie/updates
- http://http.debian.net jessie-backports
- http://ftp.us.debian.org jessie
but for each [repository] I get Err [repository] InRelease
Err [repository] Release.gpg could not resolve '[domain]' plus a few of
Failed to fetch [repository]/*
This is also possibly why other packages that should be in Debian Jessie such
as evolution, pidgin, and ekiga are also not found or unavailable.
Any advice on any of these issues?
