OT: Clues desired about Vagrant (and VMs) on ARM-based cell phones

[Rich Morin]

Background

There are a couple billion cell phones (and counting) floating around the world. Many of these aren't able to run current releases of the vendors' software or support heavyweight GUIs and other graphical applications.

So, their utility (and hence, commercial value) isn't all that great, so most of them end up getting recycled, dumped into landfill, etc. This seems like a shame, given that these are pretty capable portable computers.

PostmarketOS (pmOS) has the goal of putting together a "real" Linux distribution (based on Alpine Linux) for these devices. After a number of years of effort, they seem to be making Real Progress (TM). FYI, aarch64 is by far the best supported architecture. Here are some links, for the curious:

https://postmarketos.org/
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Notion

I'm interested in the possibility of putting together a software stack which would provide blind-accessible computing and communications capabilities. It _could_ sit directly on top of pmOS, but that would tie it rather closely to the pmOS and Alpine Linux projects. This doesn't seem like the most flexible or robust plan...

So, I'm wondering whether it might make sense to use some sort of VM to isolate the underlying OS from the user-facing software. This might, for example, be based on Debian, which has a pretty active accessibility effort:

https://www.debian.org/
https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-accessibility/

I've used Vagrant in the past and really like its (text-based and VM neutral) approach. So, it would be a logical piece of infrastructure for this effort. However, I'm pretty clueless about which VMs might work well for this.

Might anyone have clues to offer?

-r

[Rich Morin]

Crickets...

[jmc...@gmail.com]

Crickets are probably the result of nobody having anything useful to offer. Vagrant deploying to bare metal (such as a cell phone) is somewhat out-of-scope while using something like the libvirt provider will work when targeting most KVM-type and similar virtual environments running inside a target machine where an os is already installed, perhaps also pmos.

 -- jmcg