[Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

TL;DR: The idea: use vanilla Debian to get a great mobile experience on N900 (and possibly other devices) and replace Maemo
The question: are you in?
The task for now: discuss the shape

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Here and there I saw some posts of people playing with DebiaN900 or willing to do it, wanting to shape in a way it could possibly replace our dated Maemo.

We're really missing an up-to-date GNU/Linux system for the geek. Whether you have an N900, N9, N950, a libhybris-compatible Android phone or anything that can run GNU/Linux - you could benefit from it. Or maybe an N8xx...

But a couple of freelancers playing out with Debian on N900 is not enough to make an OS.

Many questions appear: should we bring h-d? What about compatibility with Maemo apps? Harmattan apps? Calls? The UI? Exchangability of DEs (GnomeShell, Unity)? Nemo UI (Glacier?) ? Sailifish UI someday?
Maemo-only frameworks (alarmd)? Accounts integration? On and on and on.
How far do we add to vanilla Debian?

Before we discuss all those questions: are you in? (even for a small task)
When we have the manpower, we can get down to technical discussion and dividing tasks.

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Current team:

• marmistrz

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Nobody expects to get closed Maemo bins working(too bad), but a multitasking Maemo feel and appearance OS built on top of perhaps Ubuntu Touch or the like would be great, especially when we get mainlined Android kernel and drivers so we can run bog Linux on Android hardware.
I am so very disappointed with the performance(on great hardware) and horrible app integration on my one Android(Cyanogen mod) device.
It is frustrating that my degrading battery and appearance but well tuned N900 is nowhere near having an object of desire even close to suitable for my puropses.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Good luck with that! It was pretty much broken in Squeeze, and was removed afterwards. At least I couldn't get it running reasonably on vanilla Debian back then.
Some people have tried to get Hildon running on newer frameworks (I think Aapo and Android_808), but I don't remember if that yielded any satisfactory results.

As a first step you could try to get at least Matchbox running. It worked in principle in Wheezy, but there were some major flaws in the UI design. I believe I found it impossible to return to the desktop by means that are available on a N900.

The 1st major point why I haven't replaced Maemo on my Main N900 yet.
The 2nd would be battery life. I got about 6 hours idle with a battery that runs Maemo idle for a week. I'd want at least a day (with suspend2RAM if incoming calls can wake it up).

No idea about the rest, but forget Gnome and Unity! These are way too heavy. LXDE works mostly fine, so should any window manager. I guess Enligtenment and Mate might be ok too. But I doubt, even Xfce would make sense.

Not at all! Otherwise someone will open another thread just like this one in two years.
Any changes that are necessary would have to be integrated into Debian, to maintain them in the long run.

No, because I don't think it's feasible.
DebiaN900 is a great playground and wicket has my utmost respect for putting it together (just like qole, who pretty much made me buy a N900 just by creating Easy Debian), but in the end the "open" N900 is just locked down too much, to fully revive it with a purely community-driven OS.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Well, getting the closed bins is the last thing I'd try, when everything else is working.

Fortunately, most Maemo software is open source. But the real way we handle it is up to discussion. First we need to make sure we have the manpower to do it.

You mean that the N900 isn't suitable anymore or that you can't find anything else suitable?

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

+1. Changed the OP "how much do we add to Debian"

Can you please justify? We have pali's linux-n900 (basically upstream) so the drivers are not (such a big) problem.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

So far I haven't seen any reports of someone phoning with the N900 on any other OS than Maemo (or Meego).

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Here's a question: would it be possible to cobble together a Maemo-like interface for the PocketCHIP? I just received one of these wonderful little handheld portable computers. It doesn't have a lot of processing power, and the screen is just 480x272 resolution.

But the nice thing is that it runs Debian. Not Android, not Ubuntu Touch; just straight-up vanilla Debian. (It comes with a very minimalist "home screen" app that has shortcuts to a few apps and some settings, but that's it.)

Anyway, from my point of view, the best thing about this device is that it is unbelievably easy to repair or modify the hardware, and it is being produced in very large volumes. (And it's cheap!) So, for me, it makes a decent platform on which to do portable Unix tasks well into the future.

A Maemo-like interface on top would make the device even nicer. :)

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Define "Maemo-like"!
There are multiple desktop environments that you can configure to work similar to Maemo's hildon and it seems like this device should be a lot faster than the N900.
So I think the only problem might be the low resolution. This could be tested in a VM in advance. And even if it is a problem, there are ways around that if you're wiling to accept a degraded display quality.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Well, if it supports Debian, then we could run the same OS configuration on PocketCHIP and on N900.

But it's not only about the interface, gnome-shell is somehow similar to the Maemo interface. We have the apps too. This is a bigger problem.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Hmm. I guess, honestly, I don't have much interest in modifying the OS on my existing N900s. I like Maemo as it is; moreover, given that no new N900s are being made (and haven't been for, what, 5 years now?), I'm not sure how long my existing supply will hold out.

The PocketCHIP hardware is fresh, cheap, and available. I'd really like to see a Maemo-like environment running on hardware that will exist into the future, rather than continue to husband the continually shrinking quantity of N900 parts. :(

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

I just tried, and although LXDE can in principle be usable at 480x288, most applications aren't.
But if you scale the desktop by divisor 2 (xrandr --scale 2x2), you get a desktop of 960x576, which is similar to netbooks and on the lower end of being usable.
The display won't be crisp anymore, but it should still be good enough in most situations.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

I'm not saying it would be super easy, but given what I have so far I think a h-d GTK3 port would be feasible and would probably be easier in the long run because of the amount of touch work that it is now integrated in upstream GTK (goodbye GTK2 maemo patches!). Its really at the point sometimes where you wonder if its worth keeping some of the Hildon classes/widgets.

HildonPannableArea for example should, as touch is integrated in GtkScrolledWindow, only need hildon_pannable_area_jump_to/scroll_to. It actually needs a little more because we can't directly tell it to animate to a certain point. All the toolbar edit/long press stuff can be simplified (or removed for now :D ) The smaller libhildon, the less we have to maintain in the long run. If libhildon used CSDs for the app menus instead of h-d you could potentially swap the window manager for anything.

I could be using profiled, mce, etc etc from cssu in my GTK3 work if only I knew how to RE one closed library (libsystemui IIRC). As it is I'm often relying on the Mer/Nemo counterparts/upstream versions and either using the existing Debian packaging rules or churning out my own set. The one problem with this is that then brings in statefs. It's a lovely idea, but Nemo/Sailfish are using Qt, so their solution for modules don't fit with GTK based desktop as nicely. Unfortunately there are a few points in the code for h-d where even attempting to build without mce etc still tries to use it. Fix these and you could theoretically use it as a desktop OS.

I can't say anything about battery life because I haven't tried any of it on a real device yet, only in amd64 Jessie vm.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

As far as desktop environments go...
I realize it has been a rough path getting enlightenment to run (but it is very configurable and slick looking)
Past "E"
My best suggestion is wmaker or wm2 for the flexibility of the minimal screen real estate on the n900.
wmaker worked quite well on the n8x0 and I enjoyed using it ...
I'm sure it would suffice for our needs on the n900.
It may not be "pretty" and polished ... but it is very very configurable and very functional for the purpose of the n900...without icons, fonts, etc disappearing on the n900.
I am sure there are other de possibles which would do as well.

As a side note.. obtusely... I have been very pleasantly surprised at the options in antix ...with the (now antiquated) options for de's... just don't find the cool stuff anymore preinstalled.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

So, it made create this post: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...64#post1509664

There's really no use in planning right now, when we don't know how many people are willing to work on it. Two people won't work the same way as 10 people. So I'll stray for the in-depth discussion of the technical issues. We need to start from the HR part here.

I changed the OP to reflect the reality: such a project could be
1. a replacement for Maemo 5/MeeGo - for those who need it
2. a real GNU/Linux Maemo-like operating system - for those running Android
3. a mobile OS - for those running GNU/Linux-powered devices
4. a Fremantle like refuge - for the Jolla/Ubuntu users who don't like their OS

The project should be hardware-agnostic.
We should run upstream kernel - if you run upstream kernel, you should have the proper hardware. No further requirements (ok, you can't phone without proper hardware, but it's not the point)

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

If you mean systemui, I can (and will) RE it, if needed, it is about 25k binary.

Battery life depends on the kernel, in 4.8 we should have all the devices fully supporting PM and deep idle states, there is just a script needed to tell UART to autoidle (just google for it)

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

It would be a great help down the line.

The replacement osso-* packages in cssu (devlock, tklock, powerkeymenu etc) will need it when I get round to porting them (http://maemo.org/packages/package_in.../0.2.0.18+0m5/).

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Rethought things, all the problems raised are completely on topic. Removed that useless comment from posts #1 and #14.

There's still one problem, even if we port h-d to gtk3. Apps.

As of today Debian lacks decent mobile apps. We have many of them, but many of them'll use libhildon+gtk2/qt4.

And if what we create is source-code incompatible with the old Maemo apps... we're screwed.

Besides - the Qt Components. But I'd see this as a second priority.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

There is the potential possibility of being able to maintain some gtk2 apps for now by building maemo gtk2 and cssu libhildon.

Don't want to hijack thread by talking more about GTK3 stuff, but a lot of the work porting isn't too bad. Renamed classes/functions, GtkVBox/GtkHBox to GtkBox with orientation param. GtkTable to GtkGrid to avoid depreciation. Clutter is a nightmare along the lines of "Oh! Thats depreciated, use this. Oh, but we've replaced that with this. My bad, that's depreciated as well, use this one no one has got round to using yet".

I'm not as interested in maintaining apps though. As you state GTK mobile apps are few and far between. The stock apps (closed) obviously need replacing. MicroB we all know needs work to replace. If we create pure(r) GTK apps, they might get picked up by other projects. My plan has always been to use as many stock/upstream/standard packages as possible, just maintain our UI and let upstream handle as much of the base as possible.

Qt is a different issue that I'm yet to tackle. My ideas dating back to Qt5 talks were to make an external qt module for the custom classes. You've got the GTK/QT comatibility theme so as long as as much GTK stuff uses stock theme rules (ie not hildon specific) it should be able to use stock Qt5. I also have the souce for qmantle2 floating around for a potential experiment of a Lipstick based WM, and a Hildon UI based on a rework of Marxians componenets. Part of the idea here was that Nokia acquired Qt 18 months prior to Maemo/Moblin merger and used it in Harmattan. If this was the direction that they felt they wanted to take Maemo, maybe I should try to honour that instead.

Re: [Discussion] Rejuvenating Maemo with DebiaN900
 

Ok, I'll start REing it in 2 weeks from now.