moved to here from Neo900 thread, since offtopic there
I didn't plan to do moderation, but reporting didn't help

/j

how about answering to those questions? nobody ?

People have gone nuts these days why ? 1Ghz is hell lot of power for a handheld

open a flash site and do something else and will see how 1Ghz isn't "a lot of power" . fremantle was designed for multitasking , when was released was a good one hardware-wise , but now it struggles , many keep n900 due software part aka maemo and hwkbd

take a step back and look at the big picture.

N900 is one of only two devices iirc that i can think of that were released with Maemo5, the other was chinese. Scratchbox is a dev environment so there are some bits that don't work fully because the hw is missing.

Neo has similar hw at the core (eg cpu, gpu) and some different (eg eMMC, modem). As there are some similarities, certain components will work as is. the rest will need a new solution, be it a compatibility layer or RE'ing a closed source binary like what has been done for MCE. once this work has been done once is should highlight issue porting to other devices. 2nd device will show if the work done originally is sustainable or if a new solution is needed.

if you drastically change core components, the base os may not even run on the new hardware so where are we then? porting team would have to do a hell of a lot more work just to get to point where they are now. think how many differences there are in hw terms between say an s4 and n900.

then there are infrastructure changes to consider. supporting multiple devices is going to need changes to repos structure. it might need changes to existing n900 packages to pull in hw specific packages depending on device. existing packages might need spliting.

the work being done on the phone they want to work on is going to benefit anyone who wants to port to something else. if you aren't happy with there choice of device, just be thankful for what they're doing as it will help if you try to port to the device you want.

I'd love that and quite frankly the potential for this option is an important reason why I want to get a Neo900.
I consider Fremantle more or less a fallback in case Debian turns out not to work as I hope.

Unfortunately I don't have the skills to port Hildon on my own, so basically what I'll be trying to do is get Debian/armhf running on the Neo900 with some UI already in Debian that works on the small screen.
So far the best I've come up with (in a 800x480px VirtualBox window) is Enlightenment.
At some point I realized that what I was doing was pretty much the same Jeff Hoogland has already done with his Bodhi distribution, so I started to look for inspiration and even to copy parts from Bodhi to my Debian vbox. (@Jeff: in case you read this, thanks a lot!)
One problem I encountered is the stability of e17. Of course this will have to be evaluated on the target plattform, but I'm kind of sceptic if it will be stable enough for my needs.
As a fallback I also tried LXDE, but if you want something less cumbersome that the Easy Debian UI variants traditional desktops just don't work well on a 3.5" touch screen.

In case you feel up to the task of porting Hildon to Debian I'd be happy to assist, but I have no programming skills to speak of and my packaging skills are dubious at best.
I tried to run matchbox in Debian and I tried the hildon package that was in Squeeze. None of them seemed to be promising.

@Sulu did u try bhodis tablet mode ?

Yes. E17's tablet mode was the only mode that was promising in some way.

In case you're interested, I documented some of the things I did here [1]. Most of it is about configuring Debian's e17 to work (not to look) similar to Bodhi's e17.
It's in german, but your favourite translation tool should work well enough.

[1] http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=145854

I had the same idea with Mer and Cordia but I was told if I want to port that its what I should go do myself, since this is called neoFREMANTLE...

seems you all are missing the rationale. It's for sure NOT for the NAME of something.
Use standard Debian ->

• mafw: none -> Mediaplayer OpenMediaplayer, Gallery: gone
• alsaped: none -> consistent handling of audio in all situations, for all sources and sinks: gone
• PA XPROT: none -> sooner or later your speakers blow up (unless we fix that on hw level).
• standard upstream kernel -> optimized power handling of maemo kernel: gone; standby time: abysmal (watch out! oversimplified picture - power handling depends on whole system)
• MCE (and all the stuff it needs, like dsme etc pp): none -> complete state control (ringtone, vibra, indicator LED, screen lock, orientation, backlight brightness): gone
• HAL-addon-bme & friends: none -> proper battery monitoring, low-bat warnings, clean shutdown: gone
• liblocation: none -> all location aware apps: gone

and so on and on (probably I missed to list 60..80% in that enumeration)

We use fremantle since it's mature and been tested for 4 years now, basing on chinook and diablo. We know it's working. We don't want to invent yet another system. If you want to do exactly that, you're of course free to do that but at least anything in context of Neo900 is clearly meant to give fremantle and all the apps made for fremantle a new life.
You might have missed that detail, but to me it seems Harmattan (N9) and even Sailfish (Jolla) are using pretty much every single detail of the subsystems I listed or missed to list above. Guess why! While other distros use exactly zero of all those.

PS: Maemo is Debian, with several special tweaks on top. So where's the rationale to use "standard Debian" (I.E. a maemo with all special maemo tweaks stripped) and do the tweaks again? There actually IS a rationale, when you call that process ReverseEngineering and do it for the closed blobs only, while keeping the FOSS parts that turn Debian into Maemo. "why buy a 4WD model? Wasn't it easier to buy the standard model and mount something to it that drives the front two wheels as well?"