You know, there are these cheap ARM netbooks that can run GNU/Linux. I have one with the WM8505 ... um, SoC? So here's a repo for putting together other people's hard work into a vaguely bootable set of files, so that you can run Debian bookworm. This only works for my exact model of netbook, so I think you'll need some tweaks to make it work.

The idea is that you'd run make, and it'll create boot.zip and rootfs.tar.gz. You gotta make two partitions on an SD card and extract them and stuff. TODO: Look up what the partitions ought to be and document them here. Or maybe write a script that does it.

I build this on Debian unstable, and I have the following packages installed for this:

• make
• bc
• bison
• flex
• gcc
• libssl-dev
• gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi
• u-boot-tools
• zip
• fakeroot
• multistrap

Catalog of everything in this repo

The Makefile describes the high level steps for doing everything. And it has the various compilation options for the kernel. And it has a list of packages to install in the root filesystem.

There's actually a whole 'nother branch, kernel, which is a rebase of @linux-wmt's kernel onto later longterm kernel releases. When you run make, it'll check out the kernel branch into a subdirectory.

Some kernel configuration options are in seed, which are mostly taken from @linux-wmt's wiki. Other options are arbitrary things that I've turned on as I needed, not in any principled way.

The uboot script is in cmd, which I've also taken from @linux-wmt's wiki. Supposedly, the exact black magic incantation needed here differs from model to model, so you might have to tweak this.

It builds the root filesystem with the buildrootfs script.

The root filesystem is set up with an init script ship/sbin/init. When you first boot the root filesystem, this script configures the packages and also sets up a user.

Uncategorized disclosures

It sets up the system so that there's a user with sudo access, and you can't log in as root.

It sets up the root filesystem with some network-related packages. This includes the non-free firmware-misc-nonfree package.

It sets up an NTP client.

It sets the LCD contrast on boot. Use /etc/udev/rules.d/10-display.rules to get it the way you like.

It has a systemd service wlgpio to control the internal USB WiFi adapter. Use systemctl start wlgpio to power the adapter on / systemctl stop wlgpio to power the adapter off.

Workflow for kernel branch

   upstream v1          upstream v2
  /                    /
-o-(mainline changes)-o
  \                    \
   (cherry-pick)        (cherry-pick) <- k2 (private)
    \                    \
-----o--------------------o <- kernel

The kernel branch is a merge commit whose second parent is the changes rebased on some upstream release, and whose first parent is the previous state of the branch. That is, the latest rebase is at kernel^2, and the previous rebase is at kernel~^2, and so on. At the end of following the merge commits' first parents, you'll reach a version of @linux-wmt's testing branch (they disclaim that they may rebase that branch).

1. Privately, move to a branch without these merge commits: git checkout -b k42 kernel^2
2. Fetch an upstream version to rebase onto: git fetch --no-tags torvalds v4.2
3. Do the rebase: git rebase FETCH_HEAD
4. Create a new commit to link the history: git commit-tree -p refs/heads/kernel -p HEAD -m "rebase v4.2" HEAD^{tree}
5. Move the kernel branch: git update-ref refs/heads/kernel (whatever the previous step prints)

(It's all weird like that to avoid back-and-forth checkouts.)