Dear Debian Developers, I am part of a team working on getting Debian on low cost laptops (see http://www.rdp.in for details) so that they can be sold with Debian preinstalled. While vanilla Debian largely works, unfortunately, making Bluetooth and sound work require kernel rebuilding. The patches and config changes are not likely to be upstreamed any time soon, so we would have to ship the laptop with a patched (non-Debian kernel). Our team is, thus, taking up the responsibility of ensuring that up-to-date kernel (with security fixes) are made available to the users of our laptop. The patches and configs are adapted from here: https://github.com/sundarnagarajan/kernel_build
The unfortunate situation is that I am forced to issue this patched kernel. Since I'd like to be a good citizen of the ecosystem, I'd like to outline the solution I have in mind. I'd like your opinion and suggestion on this. All code being developed for this purpose will be released under a DFSG compliant license, and all packages I refer to that aren't in Debian will lie in our custom (outside of Debian) repository. If there are any things I can do to make things better, please do let me know. 1. The laptop will ship with stretch preinstalled, but with a custom kernel built using the linux-source-x.xx.xx package with a custom version number, such as linux-image-4.14.13-iitb-amd64. 2. The installation will contain a package called linux-image-iitb-amd64 that conflicts with linux-image-amd64, and this package will depend on the latest patched kernel built in the previous step. 3. The sources.list on the installation will have an entry pointing to my custom repository in addition to the regular http://deb.debian.org, and will be pinned so that the kernel and kernel related packages are obtained from my custom repository. Needless to say, the custom repository's public key will also be pre-shipped with the laptop. 4. Users will be made aware of the fact that this is Debian with a custom kernel without ambiguity. Now, whenever there is a kernel update in Debian, our team will fetch the source of the updated kernel, patch, rebuild and make it available in our repository. Please let me know if the proposed solution is good, else I am open to suggestions. Thanks. Kumar -- Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows. -- Adam Heath
