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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

Regarding touch-friendlieness: users can also pick user interfaces that are not optimized for touch input during the installation, such as xfce4, mate, i3wm.

Cool! I'll do some reading. Might make for a good project next time I'm on vacation.

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.

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.)

the N900 is also 256MB ram, it's not ideal but it's usable, just add a lot of swap.

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.

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