[Gta04-owner] Replicant for GTA04?

[Neil Jerram]

PaulK <paulk at paulk.fr> writes:

> Well, it would be about running Replicant 2.3 on the device.
> That means pretty much CyanogenMod (we just remove the non-free device-specific stuff from Cyanogenmod, which are not necessary for GTA04) on Gingerbread version.
>
> After some work, I expect the following to work (via Android UI):
> * Audio (ALSA should be no problem)
> * Modem, including 3G (Standard AT will be easy to support)
> * GPS (NMEA is standard and doable)
> * Usable UI. Even though Replicant is slow, 800Mhz should be enough, and we could use 0xdroid (free) accelerated gralloc component to make it faster. 
>
> That would be the very minimum. With some more work (I can't really tell in advance), we can expect:
> * WiFi and Bluetooth support (these require a non-free firmware that we are not going to ship, but the kernel will load it if present)
> * Sensors support (it should be ok if there are free drivers that aren't just pass-through and if there is doc)
> * Advanced power managment (ie: taking care of doing proper suspend/resume, etc)
>
> And here is a list of what I won't commit support for:
> * 3D acceleration (using non-free OMAP PowerVR libs for Android)
>
> I'll probably take a very stable kernel (like the hw validation one), even though it's not the more recent one. As I'm the only Replicant developer, I prefer to use the work other people did on the kernel and focus on user-space integration more than working on both kernel and userspace.
>
> As it was already mentioned on the list, it would certainly help the project to have an Android system available ;)

Thanks, that's interesting.  I think QtMoko is around this level of
function too, but it will be nicer overall to have two workable
distributions for GTA04.  (And SHR for the moment appears to be still in
stealth mode...)

I'd be willing to contribute 50 euros towards a device for you to be
able to do this.  Clearly that's not enough on its own, but maybe others
might contribute too?

Regards,
      Neil