Porting DietPI to the Samsung Galaxy Book Go - ARM notebook.

[GregoryWest501]

Not sure if anyone is looking at porting DietPI over to the Galaxy Book Go. I do know there are a lot of people with them who love the lightness and extremely long battery life of this little notebooks. At the same time they HATE Windoze 11 from Microslop. Would be awesome if there was a Linux choice to install.

Greg

[MichaIng]

Is there any other (true) Linux distro available for this device? I just know from Samsung mobile phones that their bootloader is pretty locked up, so that custom ROMs are difficult to flash, and then have a bunch of features (VoLTS/VoWiFi and others) not available. And the few SBCs with Samsung SoC were stuck on ancient vendor kernels, since no one was able or willing to add or rebase it to mainline Linux.

Means, I would be surprised if this worked easily 😅.

... this one seems to work: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/blob/main/systems/snapdragon_7c_woa/readme.md
But a lot of patches and custom stuff inside.

[GregoryWest501]

The Galaxy Book Go is a notebook, not a phone. Nothing is locked down. So far not found another Linux distro out for the Galaxy Booko Go, yet. Know more and more people are looking.

[MichaIng]

Nothing is locked down

I just meant that everything I know from Samsung is very difficult to run with custom operating systems, mostly closed source etc.

In this case, bootloader seems to be closed source (or needs vendor blobs), kernel needs a custom device tree, and some drivers will be closed source, too. So this is the reason no other distros support it. That Velvet OS also has limited support, and too much custom stuff for me to invest time. See here: velvet-os/imagebuilder#136

So it is like with those Samsung SoCs (NanoPi M2/M3 family), a dead end or black hole for volunteer developer time 🤔. But I am open for an integration if someone finds suitable bootloader and kernel sources.

[MichaIng]

Eh, but while I personally won't invest time trying to implement this natively into DietPi, it might be possible to convert the Velvet OS Debian Trixie images into DietPi:

• Install the aarch64-trixie from here: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/releases/tag/251220-01
• More firmware installs might be needed: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/blob/main/systems/snapdragon_7c_woa/doc/required-firmware.md
• Run dietpi-installer:

  sudo bash -c "$(curl -sSf 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MichaIng/DietPi/master/.build/images/dietpi-installer')"

• Hope that it does not autoremove firmware-related packages, if any are installed. Else it would need some adjustments.