Active, images and devices

BlaBla

As I wrote before, we are trying to make PA4 as stable as possible, and as well as it was noted by some people, this involves also having images for a wide variety of devices.

What I’m doing, is kindof even another step: making the image creation as easy as possible, so that is possible for people to contribute easily in the creatoin process of those images, (especially images for previously unsupported devices).

In Mer, that is the base of Plasma Active the OS images are created from an instruction file called kickstart. you can find a source repository that creates kickstart files for plasma active here:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/plasma-active-kickstart.git

Then, what you have to do is installing a Mer SDK, following the instructions here. This is very easy, is more or less uncompressing a tarball and running a shell script inside it, and should work on any distribution.

Then, from inside the SDK chroot environment, go where you downloaded the git repo (your home is accessible from there) and do:

mer-kickstarter -e . -c latest-devel/plasma-active-latest-devel.yaml -o plasma-active-latest-ks/

it will create a kickstart for each of the supported devices in the plasma-active-latest-ks/ subdirectory, then:

cd plasma-active-latest-ks/
sudo mic create livecd plasma-active-i586.ks -o . --pkgmgr=yum --arch=i686 --logfile=plasma-active-build.log

And an iso file with the same name as the kickstart file will be created. Different devices may need different image format, such as “raw” instead of “livecd”

Right now just a few devices are supported there, what I want to achieve is to support there all the device types Active has been successfully ran on.

One thing I must say, the code in that repo is derived from the Nemo project (another Qt based project built on top of Mer) so also a better sharing of bits and pieces for device adaptations with Nemo would be awesome as well.

2 thoughts on “Active, images and devices”

  1. Gianni in Spagna

    Hi.
    Are any chances we can see in a reasonable future roms with PA for ARM devices that can be installed on normal smartphones and tablets everybody owns instead those weird devices like the tablet Vivaldi?

    Excuse my, perhaps excessively sincere, criticism, but when there are various projects like Mozilla OS, Tizen, et al. and when nobody denies there’s a new “family” that has come to stay and in many cases substitute “old” computers and handhelds one can not ask himself if wouldn’t be posible to have real Linux and real Linux desktops on these portable devices, COMMON devices, those devices everybody has, because I dont think many people is going to buy a tablet which hardware was great in 2009 but almost any middle range smartphone of nowadays is rather more potent.

    Well, I know you are doing a great job and that it isn’t anyway easy, but I think you are being very unrealistic. The “place” is Samsung Galaxy, Sony Xperia, LG, those devices you see in the streets, in the metro, bus, etc, not Vivaldi.

    Salve.

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