Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

EDIT: The work can now be followed here:

• https://maemo-leste.github.io/category/news.html https://maemo-leste.github.io/
• http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=100192

Hi!

TL;DR: Let's see if we can organise the maemo porting efforts a bit more to make
it easier for others to join and test/help-out/develop.

For some time I've been wanting to get Gentoo running on my phone, with a
mainline kernel. Now that I managed to make that work, mostly thanks to the
great work done by Pali, freemangorden and others, I realised that while a fun
target, it doesn't really help maemo a whole lot.

Others on IRC seems to think the same -- it's much better if we try to unify our
efforts move maemo forward. To make maemo live on -- after the last n900 finally
breaks (likely 20 years from now ;-).

This post aims to do just that - while there has been a lot of development
happening already recently ([1], [2]), it does seem like a good idea to
organise it a bit more, and make participation easier -- as many have indicated
that they wanted to help.

The goals right now are to take useful things from fremantle (hildon-desktop,
for example) and port them to a modern distribution, while also using the
modern/new libraries. In the current form, we're aiming for devuan (and thus
also debian, mostly), with gtk-related code being ported to gtk3.

The goal is also to get everything to work on other devices as well, so that
testing can be done on other devices than the N900:

• QEMU virtual image (perhaps we can offer a updateable devuan qcow2 image)
• Intel laptops/desktops/devices
• Cheap ARM Linux (allwinner a33?) tablets
• Development boards (like Olimex LIME boards)
• Neo900 and/or Pyra

There are a LOT of things that need to be done, and I personally also do not (by far)
oversee all that needs to be done (please reply to get things added):

• Automated builds of ported packages
• Automated deb repository where built packages go to
• Porting applications from maemo-cssu and stock repositories. (We need to
  keep a list of applications that are ported, and applications that we require
  to be ported, with some priority)
• Reverse engineering of components/packages (What ones? Link to the list or make it)
• Documentation:
  • How to join in the development(!)
  • What components do we not want to keep or port
  • What devices are known to have some sort working state, how do you set a
    device up with the ported software
  • Common porting things/problems that one might run in to
• Status: We need to keep the current status clear to prevent double work

Concluding, I think it is good if:

1) People who are interested to help out, post on this threads (perhaps also
share what you'd like to work on, or what you can work on)
2) We shape/form ideas on how we will document the process and make sure it's
doable for interested developers to join the efforts. Let's do this for a few
days and see who is interested, and then with the interested parties make some
important decisions, like where to host the documentation, and so on.
3) We figure out what our common first goals are

For now, I haven't done much programming work for this porting at all, but do
hope to do more work in the future, but we'll also need people who can do status
updates, organise lists, tasks and write documentation and keep it documentation
up to date, as well people trying to get it to work on their device.

Finally, I realise some documentation may already be out there -- please link it here, so I/we can attempt to organise it in a central place - makes it easier for others to start out.

[1] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91308
[2] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=96800

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Reserving post for documentation until moved elsewhere

• Fremantle-gtk on Github: https://github.com/fremantle-gtk3

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

So, let me start: I would like to help out!

I have a few hours per week (more in the vacation periods) that I can spend on porting, or writing documentation, and I have the following devices:

* A33 tablet with Linux 4.9 on it
* About 10 N900 phones (gathered slowly over the years)
* ARM laptops that I use all day
* Intel machines to use QEMU on, or just to test maemo on

What I can try to work on:

• Automated builds and devuan/debian repos
• Porting applications (Know C, Python, some asm, and most other languages that are relevant)
• Write documentation

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

At first, we need someone who is familiar with Devuan ecosystem ;)

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Thanks. But why a new thread?

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Because those 2 other threads are development related, not organizational and I share the opinion that those 2 should be separate - I'd rather not have post re debian repo setup or whatever in between the conversation on how to migrate clutter_effect_fade to clutter_animation :)

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

I know a few people who work directly on Devuan, and they've also said they'd help out, so I think that'll be fine.

I am trying to get it a bit more organised - to make it easier to people to start out, without having to read through 20 pages of forum threads. I like the forum, but it's not useful as a starters guide if you have to dig through lots of text, IMHO.

That said, my current goal is:

• Getting wifi/3d(mali) to work on my A33 tablet
• Get some experience building packages
• Try said packages on the tablet
• Work on the auto builder.

Is there anyone else interested in helping out one way or another? It helps if you post that in the thread, so we can try to find the right task for everyone.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

OK, so wifi works on the tablet. I hope to get mali/3d to work tonight.

And I spoke to some devuan people about building packages automatically, and then creating a repository with said packages.

Seems like it'll be doable, and we'll have to create a (gitlab) repository per package, and they'll automatically build it. I need to get some more clarity on the repository generation, but it seems like they can aid us.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

I went ahead with trying to build fremantle-gtk2 on devuan, here's the log i've written:

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

We're making good progress. There's now a debian repo online that can be added to a devuan system. Then one can 'apt-get install hildon-desktop'. After making a few extra symlinks, the system will boot directly to hildon-desktop!

Currently this works on amd64.

There are automated builds set up for amd64 with jenkins, and armel and armhf will follow soon.

We'll need a bit more time to clean up the current state, add more features, but then we should be able to put it out there and ask people for help and contributions.