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Would it be reasonable for PostmarketOS to support the OLPC XO-1? It has physically robust, capable hardware, and a great deal of technical information is avail

Would it be reasonable for PostmarketOS to support the OLPC XO-1? It has physically robust, capable hardware, and a great deal of technical information is available, but the semi-maintained software stack for it is based on an obsolete Fedora build. Is it too far away from the touch devices PmOS tends to target?

ollieparanoid 7y ago
It would be very feasible, as long as you know where the kernel sources are (and since there is a Fedora build for it, this should not be a problem). Just follow the porting guide and it will show up as new device in pmbootstrap: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device Regarding touch-friendlieness: users can also pick user interfaces that are not optimized for touch input during the installation, such as xfce4, mate, i3wm.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  Cool! I'll do some reading. Might make for a good project next time I'm on vacation.
  - joshumax 7y ago
    FWIW I maintain a port of Debian stable for my XO-1 with IceWM and it's extremely resource-light on the aging OLPC hardware. I'd be happy to throw up the build scripts on GitHub if anyone is interested.
    - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
      I would absolutely be interested! There was a great deal of experimentation with alternate distros when the XO-1 was first released, but virtually everything from that era has succumbed to link-rot.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      Doesn't the XO-1 have only 256MB RAM? That's definitely enough to boot Debian Stretch and get to a desktop, but I'm skeptical that it's useful for any real work. (Of course, keeping hardware in use even as software requirements increase is kind of a hard problem; Debian itself used to have its own projects - Emdebian 'Grip' and 'Crush' - to try and address that issue with a broadly Alpine- or pmOS-like approach, but these were abandoned a long time ago unfortunately. The whole "embedded" Linux space is a bit of a mess, and a broad, community-led project like Debian could have a positive impact there.)
      - MartijnBraam 7y ago
        the N900 is also 256MB ram, it's not ideal but it's usable, just add a lot of swap.

ollieparanoid 7y ago

It would be very feasible, as long as you know where the kernel sources are (and since there is a Fedora build for it, this should not be a problem). Just follow the porting guide and it will show up as new device in pmbootstrap: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device Regarding touch-friendlieness: users can also pick user interfaces that are not optimized for touch input during the installation, such as xfce4, mate, i3wm.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
Cool! I'll do some reading. Might make for a good project next time I'm on vacation.
- joshumax 7y ago
  FWIW I maintain a port of Debian stable for my XO-1 with IceWM and it's extremely resource-light on the aging OLPC hardware. I'd be happy to throw up the build scripts on GitHub if anyone is interested.
  - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
    I would absolutely be interested! There was a great deal of experimentation with alternate distros when the XO-1 was first released, but virtually everything from that era has succumbed to link-rot.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    Doesn't the XO-1 have only 256MB RAM? That's definitely enough to boot Debian Stretch and get to a desktop, but I'm skeptical that it's useful for any real work. (Of course, keeping hardware in use even as software requirements increase is kind of a hard problem; Debian itself used to have its own projects - Emdebian 'Grip' and 'Crush' - to try and address that issue with a broadly Alpine- or pmOS-like approach, but these were abandoned a long time ago unfortunately. The whole "embedded" Linux space is a bit of a mess, and a broad, community-led project like Debian could have a positive impact there.)
    - MartijnBraam 7y ago
      the N900 is also 256MB ram, it's not ideal but it's usable, just add a lot of swap.