Sorry for the delay - I was on vacation
It's fantastic that you guys were able to solve most of your problems yourself and even managed to run my sample image on a Kobo Mini (fixing bootloader)!!
Now I'm back with the necessary kernel changes needed to install Debian on your Kobos:
https://github.com/marek-g/kobo-kernel-2.6.35.3-marek
The only changes needed to run X11 are related to the eInk display driver and keyboard driver. Inside !Marek/framebuffer-utils folder there are the files to enable and disable eInk's autoupdate mode.
You can undo changes for touch driver because:
- the changes enable multitouch in the kernel but I still didn't find a working driver for X11 (I started implementing a custom X11 driver but it supports single touch only for now and no right button) - maybe it's because I left single touch events for compatibility with original software
- according to other posts I probably hardcoded 800x600 resolution somewhere so that needs to be fixed
If you stay with the original touch driver you can use the evdev driver for X11 and still have a working touch and even configure the right mouse button emulation.
I was playing with the image
posted here and I've found it's nice to:
- install nautilus to navigate through your files
- install okular (with extensions) to view PDF files
- install calibre - it has great ePub reader (ebook-viewer command) - it needs path to ebook as a parameter so you can use zenity command to open file selector and pass the selected path to ebook-viewer (you can use this command: ebook-viewer `zenity --file-selector`)
- install gtk-theme-switch to change font sizes and look of gtk apps
- modify gtk theme to increase slider size
- modify Firefox's chrome.css file to increase tab sizes etc. - it would be nice to have custom Firefox theme for Kobo
You can add new software to the menu by editing the awesome.lua config file in the ~/.config folder.
I hope that together we will be able to do things like:
- better screen updates (automatic full screen refresh from time to time)
- support for screen rotation at any time
- enable multitouch
- port existing / write new software
- ... ?
Have a good fun,
Marek
Related: Sample Kobo Debian firmware image