Ever had an old cheap cellphone? Perhaps with a broken screen/sim slot/barely alive battery? With MediaDeb you can turn it into a Raspberry Pi-like SBC.

MediaDeb is a hacky effort to port a recent Debian to run on a mediatek phone. No chroot, no android guts whatsoever. Just pure Debian. We try to make it work with the least effort, therefore:

• Kernels built from published vendor SDK. Forward-porting all the vendor hacks is a tedious, nearly impossible task and is outside of the scope of this project

• A minimal initrd is provided to mount the actual root partition and do any hardware-specific setup

* Battery Hack is a mod to the PMIC driver that changes the maximum voltage for the battery from 4-4.2 volts to 3.7-3.8 volts. This allows to avoid 'bloating' batteries when you keep your phone always charged.

• System Requirements.
  1. A recent Debian Stretch or Debian jessie linux distro
  2. Development packages: multistrap build-essential
  3. Caffeine
• Clone the MediaDeb repository.

DO NOT UPDATE SUBMODULES OR YOU RISK BLOATING YOUR FILESSYSTEM WITH USELESS STUFF

git clone https://github.com/nekromant/MediaDeb.git

• Run make PLATFORM=umi-x2

Check the table above for available platforms

• Get your firmware in build/fw.platform_name

• Find a suitable kernel kitchen. If your cellphone has the same SoC as one of the above you may well be lucky.

• Make yourself familiar with firmware compilation and packaging process. This may be tricky.

• Add this to the end of the kernel config. This should do the minimal trick.

CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT=y
CONFIG_CGROUPS=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y
CONFIG_SIGNALFD=y
CONFIG_TIMERFD=y
CONFIG_EPOLL=y
CONFIG_NET=y
CONFIG_SYSFS=y
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_FHANDLE=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HMAC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA256=y
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=n
CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK=n
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_XATTR=y

• Consult Systemd README and add required options for it to work.

• Compile your own kernel

• Write a platforms/your_phone/platform.mk and send us your patches!

NOTE: This section is a placeholder written by cpt. Obvious

MediaDeb comes with absolutely no warranty, not even of fitness for particular purpose. If you brick your hardware and your mom gets angry - it's all your fault ;)

Andy 'ncrmnt' http://ncrmnt.org