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fiftydinar/How to install Maemo Leste on real x86_64 hardware.md

Last active June 14, 2025 12:05
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How to install Maemo Leste on real x86_64 hardware
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How to install Maemo Leste on real x86_64 hardware.md

Introduction

At the moment of writing, Maemo Leste currently only ships images for specific mobile devices, generic ARM64 & virtual machine x86_64 images, but it doesn't ship the images for real x86_64 hardware.
Despite this, it's still possible to install Maemo Leste on real x86_64 hardware, and I will show you how.

Note

I only show the guide for single-boot Maemo Leste support. Multi-boot is maybe possible & configurable, but It's not tested.

Caution

All data on internal disk will be lost, be sure to backup.

Guide

  1. You need an USB stick for the Gparted ISO (at least 1GB) & external pluggable storage source to store the Maemo Leste image (at least 20GB of free space).
    Make an empty working directory where you will store the files from this guide & make sure it's a current directory in terminal (cd name-of-working-directory).
  2. Download Gparted ISO
    https://gparted.org/download.php
  3. Flash Gparted ISO to the USB stick (Fedora Media Writer does the job)
  4. Download Maemo Leste x86_64 virtual-machine qcow2.xz image archive (chimaera is the older release)
    https://maedevu.maemo.org/images/
  5. Extract the virtual-machine xz archive
  • xz -d name-of-the-xz-archive
  1. Download qemu-img & make it executable (source from pkgforge repos):
  • wget https://pkgs.pkgforge.dev/dl/bincache/x86_64-linux/qemu/ppkg/qemu-img/raw.dl -O qemu-img && chmod +x qemu-img
  1. Convert qcow2 to raw image format (img)
  • ./qemu-img convert -O raw name-of-qcow2 name-of-img
  1. Copy/cut the img to the external storage source (external HDD as an example)
  2. You can remove the working directory if you wish, as it's not needed anymore
  3. Plug the external HDD & Gparted USB to the hardware & boot into Gparted. When prompted, just press Enter. Gparted disk screen will pop-up.
  4. In Gparted disk screen, take a note of the device path of the internal disk & path of PARTITION for external HDD (/dev/sda is a device path, /dev/sda2 is a partition path for example)
  5. Wipe all the partitions of the internal disk in Gparted.
  6. Mount the external HDD (change the path accordingly):
  • sudo mkdir -p /mnt/External-Disk && sudo mount /dev/external-disk-partition-path /mnt/External-Disk
  1. Copy img content to the internal disk of the hardware (change the path accordingly):
  • sudo dd if=/mnt/External-Disk/path-to-maemo-leste-img of=/dev/internal-disk-device-path bs=4M status=progress
  1. Unmount the external HDD disk:
  • sudo umount /mnt/External-Disk && sudo rm -r /mnt/External-Disk
  1. In Gparted, go to the top bar & Refresh devices list.
  2. You will now notice 2 partitions to the internal disk. Around 250MB is for the bootloader (GRUB), 2nd bigger partition is system data (root).
  3. Expand the root partition as much as possible.
  4. Exit Gparted & unplug the Gparted USB.
  5. Just enter the default 1st entry of Devuan when GRUB shows up for Maemo Leste to boot.
  6. You can ignore the expanding microSD card section in Maemo Leste Welcome message, as we already did that in Gparted.

That's it, enjoy Maemo Leste like I do!

Photos

Screenshot_at_22-17-10 IMG_20250610_175920_984 IMG_20250613_134347_751

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