Intro - Station X and Plasma Mobile

Wed Oct 4 15:21:40 UTC 2017

Hi Station X guys,

The hardware you are going to use will not directly be able to run 
Plasma Mobile as it's drivers are designed to work with Android. You 
will need to port Halium, which is the hardware adaption of Plasma 
Mobile, to the device, using an Android kernel and a device tree. For 
that, you need to have access to at least the kernel sources and the 
device tree which (I heard) could be a little bit difficult with Mediatek.

I think it would be very important for the community and potential 
customers (also the community of Plasma Mobile in the end), that the 
device has a quite new kernel (most phones have old kernels but maybe 
something that's not EOL like 3.18 which many manufacturers currently 
use) and that the device tree and kernel are available to the community 
as open-source.

The old bq devices with Ubuntu Touch (also Mediatek powered) are mostly 
closed-source, first, there wasn't even the kernel source released due 
to some contract with Mediatek.
This closed-source model worked fine as long as canonical had access to 
the source and could work on the Hardware support, but it's now making 
problems for the UBports community when they need to fix some bugs in 
code they don't have.
As your previous messages sounded like you want to work together with 
the community, you should take care of using hardware for which the 
developers can get the source code.

Some people say it is very difficult to run Linux on Mediatek hardware 
and prefer Qualcomm. Qualcomm seems to release the kernel source on 
codeaurora at least.
I'd say the screensize is not that important for development, but that 
the board used is well supported by open-source android (Halium needs 
sort of LineageOS support, which you'd need to create from the sources 
you get from Mediatek or Qullcomm) and that the kernel and a few other 
parts are open source.

I hope I could help a little bit with the hardware choice (the little 
knowledge I have about this is from reading the messages in the Halium 
Telegram group and the docs).

I wish you good luck with your project!

On 04.10.2017 15:52, Eddie Vassallo wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> It's great to meet you all - and really appreciate you getting back to 
> us so quickly!
>
> We're actually in the stage now where we are considering a number of 
> ODM hardware manufacturers for the handset - so would really love to 
> sync with you - first and foremost - on the prefrred hardware 
> requirements for Plasma Mobile - and any steer on the type of hardware 
> (from screen size to processor/ram) you would recommend.
>
> Obviously I know the project is still being developed and shaped, but 
> we would love to get a few prototype devices (best matching your 
> criteria) in house and perhaps collaborate on firming up an initial 
> working prototype that can be passed to production stage. We could 
> then evolve from there and hopefully get to the point where we could 
> offer a 'Developer Edition' for the community (as a first release) as 
> I know everyone is dying to get their hands on Plasma Mobile, even to 
> help test and iron things out at this stage.
>
> So you know, the hardware we are mainly looking at is between 5.5 - 
> 6.0 inch screen sizes, 720p and 1080p version with Mediatek processors 
> and from 3-4GB RAM. These hardware options have been designed for 
> Android (obviously) but are unlocked, rooted, and ready to go in terms 
> of retrofitting Plasma Mobile. I know I have grossly simplified things 
> there ;-) but both Darren and myself are excited to get some hardware 
> prototypes in house, and start testing and seeing how we could make 
> this work.
>
> Do let me know your thoughts on minimum system requirements - and any 
> other info that could help steer us - and we'll keep shooting 
> questions over to the mailing group. Perhaps we could set up a Slack 
> Channel at some point to discuss further?
>
> Thanks again - and looking forward to working with you guys!
>
> Best,
>
> -Eddie
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Bhushan Shah <bhush94 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:bhush94 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hey Eddie (and Darren)
>
>     On Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 11:34:20AM +0100, Eddie Vassallo wrote:
>     > http://stationx.rocks
>
>     Good to know about you.. :)
>
>     > Obviosuly I know you guys are working with others like Purism on the
>     > release of their upcoming Librem 5 which looks excellent - but I
>     know that
>     > won't be available until 2019. We are hoping to go much sooner, and
>     > obviously can start releasing from potentially Q1 2018 on a
>     'Developer
>     > Edition' of a mobile using Plasma Mobile.
>
>     Do you have any more details about the hardware you are going to use?
>
>     Thanks
>
>     --
>     Bhushan Shah
>     http://blog.bshah.in
>     IRC Nick : bshah on Freenode
>     GPG key fingerprint : 0AAC 775B B643 7A8D 9AF7 A3AC FE07 8411 7FBC
>     E11D
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> :::::::::
>
> Eddie Vassallo
> Founder
>
> Station X
> Bletchley Park Science & Innovation Centre
> Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire
> MK3 6EB
>
> T: +44 (0) 203 036 0863
> M: +44 (0) 7740 595 753
> E:  eddie at stationx.rocks
>
> http://stationx.rocks
> @stationXlinux
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-mobile mailing list
> Plasma-mobile at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-mobile

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-mobile/attachments/20171004/54600a8a/attachment.html>