OK- I've looked into this a little further. Debian's default kernel would
definitely not work, because it's missing support for the NAND memory which
is integrated into the chip. This can be dealt with in two ways:
*Re-compile the kernel with NAND support: it's possible- the Chip uses free
drivers/firmware/whatever- but will require further investigation, since they
aren't packages with the 'mainline' kernel yet, and may simply not be
practical.
*Not use NAND: whilst this is achievable, and indeed used by the both the
EOMA68-A20 project and Pablo Rath's Debian Stretch boot on the Chip to solve
the issue, it doesn't look practical here. I don't think you can boot the
Chip from an SD card (if you can, then that would work), and USB support
requires flashing mainline u-boot and a cumbersome boot process.
Altogether, the first solution looks like it may be the one required.
Naturally, therefore, there might (though won't necessarily) be some
experimentation involved, so the blobs might have to stay for the meanwhile.
I am extremely sorry about that- if I misled you to believe it was already
liberated, that was an honest mistake and one which I should have taken *far*
more care to avoid in discussing it. Hopefully, though, NAND support is not
too difficult to copy across; once that's done, it should be a half-decent
PDA.
