Comment 11 for bug 848154

There are two separate issues to consider here:

1. User space packages: The discussion so far has centered around this one. Anyone can rebuild the Ubuntu packages and recreate an ARMv5/v6 based distro out of them. There appear to be a number of parties that are interested in this, mostly for v5, and the multiarch support should make this much easier to support in the long run. I would highly doubt that Canonical is interested in this, mostly because the specs of any ARMv5/v6 device are simply not enough to run a desktop distro, with less than 512MB of RAM. Linaro is also not likely to help out there because all the members are focused on their ARMv7 based products now. This could change of course if Broadcom or someone else with a lot of ARMv6 devices was joining Linaro.

2. Kernel support: Any device that is getting supported by a general purpose distro needs kernel support. From all I can tell, Broadcom are almost violently opposed to working with the community, so this is not happening any time soon. The bcm2708 platform code does not seem to be all that bad and I guess someone with enough time on their hands can do the work to clean that up by themselves. Reverse-engineering and rewriting the Videocore stuff is a completely different thing though, so any distro would be limited to the things that run on the ARM11 core and none of the video acceleration that make the hardware platform mildly interesting to users.