Gentoo Phone

Chymera · Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 5:33 pm Post subject: Gentoo Phone

For a while now I have been thinking how awesome it would be to have Gentoo on my phone; and after installing Gentoo on my RPi I even came to the realization that you can even compile stuff in a ~reasonable time directly on arm processors.. I found a guide some time ago about installing a prefix Gentle system on a smart phone, which however, is a bit like getting a Lada when you want a Lexus

Even if I would settle for that - it seems there is no software in portage to deal with calls and sms?
Meanwhile, a month ago the first phones with Ubuntu on them started shipping. I haven't been able to find out what GNU/linux software they use for phone/SMS, but why else can Ubuntu do what Gentoos cannot? what would gentoo need to be able to run on a contemporary smartphone?
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szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3135

There is for example gammu for talking to GSM network. I sometimes use it on my modem. Honestly I don't know how closly related those cases are, but you can give it a shot.

yngwin · Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 2:46 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo Phone

sera · Retired Dev Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 1017 Location: CET

6-7 years ago I had a Gentoo based phone but then the hardware died and am currently running android on my phone. Generally everything did work that had to work.

The stack I used was ofono iirc which is still maintained in tree and for the ui I used enlightenment. How viable it is this days I can't say tho.

As a starting point http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gentoo might help.

As yngwin mentioned there is RAP (basically gentoo prefix), which was planned to be added to the play store and might be available already.

SirRobin2318 · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2015 10:18 am Post subject:

And then there's this indiegogo "campaign": https://i.imgur.com/39pl4um.jpg

steveL · Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:37 am Post subject:

totony · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2014 Posts: 40

apathetic · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2014 Posts: 36

I used to run gentoo on my nokia n900. Trust me, it's not worth it. First of all, building software on it is a real pain in the ass. DistCC helps a little, but all those configure scripts are still really slow. Cross-compiling isn't a solution either because lots of packages just fail to build that way, and configure scripts are the reason in the vast majority of cases.

And one more thing, linux lacks the software to really use the phone part. That is, you won't be able to make calls with your phone running gentoo most likely. At least I couldn't find anything working.