This page recors my tries to get Debian working on a N810 Nokia Internet Tablet. Maemo is as good as dead, there is no support for the n810 anymore, so it would be great to get Debian running on N810.

One would use the Easy Debian package, but you don't get ride of maemo, so I'd like to try the hard way.

Links

• Arnaud Ebalard wrote a page about getting Debian on a N810, I will base my works on it.
• http://www.vinc17.org/maemo/partition.fr.html <- how to support ext3 in n810
• http://www.digriz.org.uk/debootstrap-qemu <- this looks cool and seems to work!

Step by step

First try

Note: I'm using Debian on my desktop, so I'll use it for debootstrap and so on.

• Partitioned my 4 GByte SD-Card with gparted. It also formated it to ext3, great program.
• used debbootstrap to install Debian on the SD-Card

I tried http://wiki.debian.org/EmDebian/CrossDebootstrap#QEMU.2BAC8-debootstrap_approach to cross debootstrap, but it did not work for me

Second try

On the n810 as root

• apt-get install binutils
• mkdir /tempo
• cd /tempo
• wget ftp://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.36_all.deb
• dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.36_all.deb
• wget http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/coreutils/coreutils_8.13-3_armel.deb
• dpkg-deb -x coreutils_8.13-3_armel.deb coreutils
• cp ./coreutils/usr/bin/md5sum /usr/bin/md5sum
• cp ./coreutils/usr/bin/sha1sum /usr/bin/
• debootstrap --include="sudo" --verbose --arch=armel wheezy /media/mmc1 http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/
  • W: Failure trying to run: chroot /media/mmc1 mount -t proc proc /proc

Failure again !

• # chroot /media/mmc1
  • FATAL: kernel too old
• # uname -a
  • Linux Nokia-N810-23-14 2.6.21-omap1 #2 Tue Oct 14 11:25:25 EEST 2008 armv6l unknown

I'll have to try with debian stable (third try...)

Third try

I'm trying (again) to cross debootstrap, this time not directly on a sd card.

• mkdir debian-armel-wheezy
• debootstrap --foreign --include="sudo" --verbose --arch=armel wheezy debian-armel-wheezy/ http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/
• cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static debian-armel-wheezy/usr/bin
• chroot debian-armel-wheezy
• ./debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage