[Discuss] ten more years

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:
> * Irony alert: a 2013 Nexus 7 shouldn't have to be discarded as
> pathetic. This calibre machine used to be supercomputer territory.

I'm hoping postmarketos (or ideally debian mobile + their arm porting
teams) goes somewhere so I don't have to discard my Samsung (which being
more than 1.5 years old obviously can't be expected to be patched any
further). Or, really, I'm not going to discard it, but I hope one day to
run something that will make it slightly less like carrying windows 98
in my pocket but with wifi.

Anyone have any general advice on how to start learning the fundamentals
you need to start porting non-Android Linux to a smart phone? My model
isn't among those that LineageOS has a port for. That seems to be the
starting point for all such efforts. Without that I'm not sure where to
begin.

Even just a book about the architecture of android based phones might be
nice purely for interest sake. Is there a good reference? Every book
I've looked at is just how to program Android Apps. Is there nothing
that describes a typical device architecture (or maybe there's not much
common to the various devices?) the way there used to be for the
PC. I.e. something that describes the bus topology, the interrupts,
etc. Oh, and good information about device start up and the boot loaders
used or available, probably would need that. BIOS or UEFI in the PC is
to _____ on a phone, for instance? 

It's such a tease having Android on a phone, it being almost like a real
GNU/Linux environment. E.g. I'd assumed the other day I could easily
install youtube-download (Perl) or youtube-dl (Python) under Termux, but
no such luck, not in their apt repository. Then I try cpan and that
seems not to work at all under Termux. Blah.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org