Posts in category 'linux'

I recently received the fantastic first laptop from a new company called Framework, which is specializing in building extremely user-serviceable, repairable, upgradeable laptops (in fact, they recently received a rare 10 out of 10 from iFixit). I opted for the DIY unit, which among other things allowed me to bring my own operating system, and for me the OS of choice is unquestionably Debian Linux.

Prior to receiving my Framework I’d been running Debian testing on a fifth generation Lenovo X1 Carbon. As is typically the case with Lenovo, the X1 worked extremely well with Linux. In fact, it worked far better than I’d ever expected of Linux on a laptop, which I’d come to assume was always an unreliable, janky affair.

Framework has similarly embraced the Linux community but, given the cutting edge hardware they’ve included, I was expecting some rough spots while drivers and so forth matured. And while this has turned out to be somewhat true, the good news is it’s been quite easy to get past those issues, and I’m happy to report that Debian testing is now working extremely well on my Framework.

In the rest of this write-up I cover the steps I took to get a fully functional Debian Bullseye installation running on my machine using the Gnome desktop environment (after which I did an in-place upgrade to Bookworm).

Of course, if you’re looking for a slightly more turnkey solution, I strongly recommend trying out Ubuntu 21.04, which ships with a kernel that fully supports the Framework hardware. You’ll still need to take steps to get the fingerprint reader working, but at least you can avoid compiling a kernel.

Way back in the before time, in the long long ago of 2008, I decided to participate in the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One program. The vision of the program was compelling: play a small part in enabling childhood education by providing children in the poorest parts of the world access to cheap, simple, rugged computers. Load them with electronic books and educational software. Add support for wifi and mesh networking to enable connectivity. Unlock creativity in kids the way computers unlocked creativity in me.

Things didn’t exactly pan out as everyone had hoped, but I still ended up with my very own OLPC XO-1, and it’s sat quietly in a closet ever since, a toy that I take out and play with occasionally.

Well, we recently did a top-to-bottom purge of our house, and in doing so I once again ran across my XO-1. So I decided to take it out and play with it again. In particular, I was curious: what would it take to run the very latest version of Debian on this modest little device?

Turns out not much! But where it got tricky, it got really tricky…