October 2026 Meeting; Porting Debian to Chromebooks and gaming on Linux
We started with the current state of VoLTE compatibility in Australia, and its impact on Linux mobile. Then Yifei started his talk on porting Debian to cheap, ex-school chromebooks. Yifei discussed the general workflow of porting Debian to new mobile devices, how image generation works, and why it is important to use the mainline kernel instead of reusing Android kernel with Halium. He then talked about the current state of the chromebook bootloader, depthcharge, and how that affects kernel installation on different models of a given reference device.
Moving to the hardware side, issues of firmware and GPU acceleration were discussed along with different proposed mechanism of extracting firmware from an existing installation of chromeOS to avoid shipping non-free firmware with Debian.
On the topic graphic shell, Yifei explained the recent process on bringing Lomiri, a convergent shell to Debian and how to try it on Debian devices, and what to expect. More details and demos for Lomiri on Debian will be delivered in the next talk.
In the Q/A section, we discussed GPS support for Linux tablets and how to find a good first target to port Debian to, using information from the Nura wiki (previously PostmarketOS wiki).
Links:
https://halium.org/ Hardware Abstraction Layer for Android devices
https://packages.debian.org/stable/embedded/droid-juicer Extract firmware from Android partitions
https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Devices#Laptops/tablets Potential targets for porting Debian to
https://github.com/selvakn/gsm-sip-bridge GSM SIP bridges to connect to VoLTE
https://manpages.debian.org/testing/debos/debos.1.en.html Debian image builder
https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Category:ChromeOS Chromebooks with aarch64 can run modern Linux apps
https://rnote.flxzt.net/ Note-taking on Linux with pressure sensitive pen
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Moving on to the second part of this meeting, Andrew Pam provided an update on the recent developments of gaming on Linux. Including improved support for running Windows-native games. 2 Linux-native game launchers were discussed, lutris and heroic, both of them can connect to commercial game distributors such as Epic and GOG (DRM-free), and handle environment configuration for Wine/Proton. He confirmed that ProtonDB is still a good source for checking compatibility before buying games.
Andrew Pam then discussed some interesting emergent narrative games with elements from Hopepunk, a genre about characters making positive change in an often post-apocalyptic environment. Games in this genre include Caravan SandWitch, I was a teenage exocolonist, and RimWorld.
Links:
https://lutris.net/ Lutris Launcher
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ heroic launcher
https://www.gog.com/ DRM free games
Games discussed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_SandWitch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinarium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RimWorld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_a_Teenage_Exocolonist
https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/