[HH] Debian on smartphones

[Tom Metro]

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/