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DennisHeine	2019-02-21 , 10:20
Posts: 10 \| Thanked: 27 times \| Joined on Feb 2019	#11

I really want to get a standart debian working on this phone

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	wicket	2019-02-21 , 17:26
	Posts: 634 \| Thanked: 3,266 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia	#12

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

I really want to get a standart debian working on this phone

Maemo Leste is pretty close to Debian already. Patches are upstreamed to the various projects it depends on. Unfortunately in the case of Debian, my experience is that they are not really interested in contributions from outsiders. Here's an example of a patch I submitted, completely ignored:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=893814

As for GSM, Maemo Leste already has SMS and 2G/3G data working with ofono although I don't believe they have been integrated into the UI yet. Phone calls have been reported to work but are currently of poor quality. See here for more info:

https://github.com/maemo-leste/bugtracker/issues/77
https://github.com/maemo-leste/bugtracker/issues/76

You may want to check out unicsy_demo, which has recently been packaged and is available in Leste:

https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo

If you really are serious about getting this working and you believe you can help, I second sulu's suggestion and recommend that work together with the Maemo Leste team. If pure Debian is what you are after, it will be easy enough get telephony running on Debian once it's running on Leste.

__________________
~~DebiaN900 - Native Debian on the N900.~~ Deprecated in favour of Maemo Leste.

Maemo Leste for N950 and N9 (currently broken).
Devuan for N950 and N9.

Mobile devices with mainline Linux support - Help needed with documentation.

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer

Last edited by wicket; 2019-02-21 at 17:32.

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	wicket	2019-02-21 , 20:29
	Posts: 634 \| Thanked: 3,266 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia	#13

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

I really want to get a standart debian working on this phone

I should also mention that there are standard Devuan images for the N900 and other phones (N950, N9, Droid 4) which do not use any of the Maemo Leste bits:

https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/embedded/

Those will be even closer to standard Debian and you will be able to install Xfce, etc. easily without the issues I mentioned in my other post.

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DennisHeine	2019-02-22 , 01:25
Posts: 10 \| Thanked: 27 times \| Joined on Feb 2019	#14

Originally Posted by wicket

I should also mention that there are standard Devuan images for the N900 and other phones (N950, N9, Droid 4) which do not use any of the Maemo Leste bits:

https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/embedded/

Those will be even closer to standard Debian and you will be able to install Xfce, etc. easily without the issues I mentioned in my other post.

hey, this sounds cool. does it use or allow debian repositorys?

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	wicket	2019-02-22 , 02:27
	Posts: 634 \| Thanked: 3,266 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia	#15

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

hey, this sounds cool. does it use or allow debian repositorys?

Devuan is a fork of Debian, optimised for use without systemd. It has its own repositories which are virtually identical to Debian's, with the exception that some packages have been fixed to work without systemd, whilst a small number of troublesome packages have been blacklisted.

If you've really got a dying need to run systemd, there's nothing stopping you from adding Debian repositories, but I would recommend against it.

Those Devuan images were cut for the stable release so they are quite old now. If you run Maemo Leste, you'll get Devuan, plus a newer kernel which is regularly updated and contains a number of fixes for the N900 that would be missing from the Devuan stable kernel.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the only reason for running standard Devuan over Maemo Leste would be if you want to run an alternate WM/DE instead of Hildon. You're really tempting me to get off my arse and work on those patches that will fix this.

Last edited by wicket; 2019-02-22 at 18:59.

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DennisHeine	2019-02-22 , 04:14
Posts: 10 \| Thanked: 27 times \| Joined on Feb 2019	#16

Originally Posted by wicket

Devuan is a fork of Debian, optimised for use without systemd. It has its on repositories which are virtually identical to Debian's, with the exception that some packages have been fixed to work without systemd, whilst a small number of troublesome packages have been blacklisted.

If you've really got a dying need to run systemd, there's nothing stopping you from adding Debian repositories, but I would recommend against it.

Those Devuan images were cut for the stable release so they are quite old now. If you run Maemo Leste, you'll get Devuan, plus a newer kernel which is regularly updated and contains a number of fixes for the N900 that would be missing from the Devuan stable kernel.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the only reason for running standard Devuan over Maemo Leste would be if you want to run an alternate WM/DE instead of Hildon. You're really tempting me to get off my arse and work on those patches that will fix this.

main reason for me to want standard debian is to get the latest firefox/chrome browser for whatsapp web, and to get docker running on the n900 (just don't ask ^^) - also i want gnome3, which isn't available in squeeze.

kernel 4.9 is currently compiling, but it takes a hell of time to complete on the n900.

the gsm phone shouldnt be much of a problem, the curernt kernel contains a n900 modem/gsm driver (maybe it has to get patched for voice data, but it seems possible.), which is another reason for me wanting to get a clean install.
i've found a python phone that uses ofono after hours of searching which runs with fixed python repositories and manually compiled pygtk, as long as the modem driver is running.

maybe i can contribute it to the Devuan team. do you know which kernel they are using? (n900 modem support has been added to 3.16 afaik). it could become hard to get it into devuan, because as said before it needs a patched kernel for voice support (mainline kernel only has got ssi, whereas voice requires hsi). i don't know if the project maintainer will give his ok to this.

edit: yeah, my phone drained again... damn bs, it has to be restarted every half an hour, and kernel compilations takes hours, up to days.
in my next live, i'll start a carreer as a politican. that's much less of an hassle.

Last edited by DennisHeine; 2019-02-22 at 04:26.

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	wicket	2019-02-22 , 06:37
	Posts: 634 \| Thanked: 3,266 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia	#17

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

main reason for me to want standard debian is to get the latest firefox/chrome browser for whatsapp web, and to get docker running on the n900 (just don't ask ^^) - also i want gnome3, which isn't available in squeeze.

You do realise that both the latest Firefox and Chrome require way more memory than the N900 has?

I don't think you've understood me yet, Maemo Leste is built on top of Devuan, that means it includes the entire Devuan software library which is almost identical to Debian. The same Firefox, Chrome, Docker and GNOME 3 packages are available in Leste. The kernel is currently missing all of the config options required for full container support. I recently built a kernel based on the Leste kernel with these options enabled. You can find the config here:

https://github.com/dderby/n9xx-linux...rx51_defconfig

This should make its way into the Leste kernel at some point. The plan is to support Anbox containers, so that might be a better way for you to run WhatsApp, if it doesn't run out of memory that is.

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

kernel 4.9 is currently compiling, but it takes a hell of time to complete on the n900.

You're building it on the device?

Good luck with finishing that sometime this year!

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

the gsm phone shouldnt be much of a problem, the curernt kernel contains a n900 modem/gsm driver (maybe it has to get patched for voice data, but it seems possible.), which is another reason for me wanting to get a clean install.
i've found a python phone that uses ofono after hours of searching which runs with fixed python repositories and manually compiled pygtk, as long as the modem driver is running.

You'll need libcmtspeech to get audio. Not available in Debian or Devuan but I believe it has now been packaged for Leste.

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

maybe i can contribute it to the Devuan team. do you know which kernel they are using? (n900 modem support has been added to 3.16 afaik). it could become hard to get it into devuan, because as said before it needs a patched kernel for voice support (mainline kernel only has got ssi, whereas voice requires hsi). i don't know if the project maintainer will give his ok to this.

I can't remember which kernel was used when the stable release was cut, it's definitely newer than 3.16 but it's still older than the Leste kernel. Stable means stable, you won't be able to get a new kernel into the stable release. The Maemo Leste image builder is built on top of the Devuan arm-sdk. The Devuan arm-sdk maintainer is also involved in Maemo Leste and was the one who created the Leste image builder. When the next Devuan release is cut, it will most likely use the latest kernel that has already been tested in Leste.

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

edit: yeah, my phone drained again... damn bs, it has to be restarted every half an hour, and kernel compilations takes hours, up to days.
in my next live, i'll start a carreer as a politican. that's much less of an hassle.

Why bother? Forget about Devuan and just use Leste which comes with Linux 4.15.7 plus PVR patches!

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sulu	2019-02-22 , 09:24
Posts: 915 \| Thanked: 3,209 times \| Joined on Jan 2011 @ Germany	#18

Originally Posted by wicket

You do realise that both the latest Firefox and Chrome require way more memory than the N900 has?

Quoted for truth.

@Dennis:
Just try firefox-esr under Easy Debian Jessie and you'll see, that it's unbearably slow (if it starts at all, that is).
Tbh I haven't tried Firefox/Iceweasel under ED since Wheezy, but even then it was nigh unusable.
The "Quantum update" was mainly about parallelizing things, which is great on a modern x86 PC with umpteen cores, but useless on a single-core Cortex A8.
On my EEE 901 netbook I see basically no speed improvement, because all the puny Atom N270 has to offer in terms of parallelizing is hyperthreading of a single core. What I see is, that now both threads are running at 100% for a minute instead of one, until the GUI is loaded.

Originally Posted by wicket

You're building it on the device? Good luck with finishing that sometime this year!

I'm surprised the N900's watchdog doesn't keep rebooting the system every five minutes (RD mode on?).
When I started toying around with Easy Debian I pretty soon decided that I wouldn't compile on the N900. But I also was too lazy to properly learn how to cross-compile. Qemu was unbearably slow (even on my i7-2700k it was slower than on the N900), so I decided to buy a Cubieboard 2.

Edit:
Wait a second, I believe this actually IS the watchdog:

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

edit: yeah, my phone drained again... damn bs, it has to be restarted every half an hour,

Last edited by sulu; 2019-02-22 at 09:31.

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Spinal	2019-02-22 , 10:02
Posts: 3 \| Thanked: 16 times \| Joined on Jun 2010	#19

Originally Posted by DennisHeine

kernel 4.9 is currently compiling, but it takes a hell of time to complete on the n900.

It takes about 10 minutes to build kernel for N900 on my Debian PC.

Here are some commands that you may be interested in. I use them to build my own kernel for Maemo Leste:

Code:

# Install build deps:
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential crossbuild-essential-armhf u-boot-tools
# Build options:
kerneldir=~/tmp/linux   # where kernel sources located
targetdir=~/tmp/kernel  # where to install kernel and modules
MAKEOPTS="-j4"          # number of CPU cores you have
compiler=/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-
arch=arm
# Configure kernel:
cd $kerneldir/ &&
make mrproper &&
make ARCH=$arch CROSS_COMPILE=$compiler menuconfig
# Build kernel:
make $MAKEOPTS ARCH=$arch CROSS_COMPILE=$compiler zImage modules omap3-n900.dtb
# Install:
cat arch/arm/boot/zImage arch/arm/boot/dts/omap3-n900.dtb > zImage &&
make $MAKEOPTS ARCH=$arch CROSS_COMPILE=$compiler INSTALL_MOD_PATH=$targetdir INSTALL_MOD_STRIP=1 modules_install &&
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 80008000 -e 80008000 -n zImage -d zImage uImage &&
mkdir -p $targetdir/boot && cp -v zImage uImage $targetdir/boot/ &&
echo OK || echo FAIL

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DennisHeine	2019-02-23 , 15:27
Posts: 10 \| Thanked: 27 times \| Joined on Feb 2019	#20

Originally Posted by wicket

You do realise that both the latest Firefox and Chrome require way more memory than the N900 has?

I don't think you've understood me yet, Maemo Leste is built on top of Devuan, that means it includes the entire Devuan software library which is almost identical to Debian. The same Firefox, Chrome, Docker and GNOME 3 packages are available in Leste. The kernel is currently missing all of the config options required for full container support. I recently built a kernel based on the Leste kernel with these options enabled. You can find the config here:

https://github.com/dderby/n9xx-linux...rx51_defconfig

This should make its way into the Leste kernel at some point. The plan is to support Anbox containers, so that might be a better way for you to run WhatsApp, if it doesn't run out of memory that is.

awesome, thanks alot!

You're building it on the device? Good luck with finishing that sometime this year!

it's really hard

but my scratchbox is broken for some time, and before messing up my system, i decided to use the phone

the worst problem is, that it goes off every hour, even though it's being charged.

You'll need libcmtspeech to get audio. Not available in Debian or Devuan but I believe it has now been packaged for Leste.

nice

I can't remember which kernel was used when the stable release was cut, it's definitely newer than 3.16 but it's still older than the Leste kernel. Stable means stable, you won't be able to get a new kernel into the stable release. The Maemo Leste image builder is built on top of the Devuan arm-sdk. The Devuan arm-sdk maintainer is also involved in Maemo Leste and was the one who created the Leste image builder. When the next Devuan release is cut, it will most likely use the latest kernel that has already been tested in Leste.

Why bother? Forget about Devuan and just use Leste which comes with Linux 4.15.7 plus PVR patches!

all right

thanks for that clear and detailed answer. it gave a good overview.