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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

I see several comments questioning the choice of Manjaro on PinePhone, but as the name suggests it's Community Edition after all; Those who want Manjaro on smartphone, now have a device to develop for.

I think, the way Pine64 is pushing these CE devices is smart and definitely a positive step for overall pure Linux smartphone ecosystem. But, I'm also hearing great things about Mobian[1] on PinePhone and AFAIK it's being largely developed by an individual. I would like Pine64 to come up with a way to support these talented individual developers as well, besides supporting large well-established communities.

[1]https://mobian-project.org/

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Lot of the projects pinephone depends on are developed just by a bunch of talented individuals. Majority of the PinePhone specific bootloader/firwmare/kernel driver work and upstreaming is done by maybe 3 individuals, neither of whom are associated with any of the distros supported so far, AFAIK. And you can't have a working distro without a working kernel. A lot of value is based on the results of linux-sunxi.org project, and related communities, like lima project, etc. It's FOSS, hey. Everything depends on everything, and it's kind of a hard to support everyone.

I personally wish for a "Linux kernel CE" edition, in the future, being one of those kernel devs. ;)

How/where does one contribute? Is there a guide specifically for this (phone/pinephone development). I couldn't quite figure it out from the mobian repo ):

Icenowy did the initial board bringup, I think: https://github.com/Icenowy

I don't know if Samuel accepts donations, but his contact info is here: https://sholland.org/about/ (he's responsible for the huge power saving optimizations that PinePhone got this year, and for the sound codec improvements, that were necessary for making calls work)

And I have a page here: https://xnux.eu/contribute.html

As for the mobian I don't know. I don't follow distributions that much.

I meant code contributions, but thanks for the links ;)

Ah, you can contribute just by doing something for the project you're interested in. None of the development is centrally organized.

There's plenty of stuff to do. I can give you a bunch of hints if you're a kernel dev. :)

I'm not (yet?) a kernel dev; I haven't ever contributed to any OS project, but I'd like to start with the pinephone.

Bootlin has some very nice introductory training materials online:

https://bootlin.com/doc/training/linux-kernel/ https://bootlin.com/docs/

Allwinner SoC used in PinePhone has a longstanding community around it organized around http://linux-sunxi.org/ There are a lot of materials, including datasheets there, etc.

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone wiki also has a lot of information.

#pinedev at freenode is where the kernel development discussion happens, so feel free to join there.

Meanwhile you can install Mobian in any Pinephone, and support the Mobian Project here https://liberapay.com/mobian/donate

I can confirm that Mobian is pretty good. And I'd love a community edition of it.

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