Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Qole,

What if I keep the first partition a 128 MB SWAP partition? Shouldn't that prevent Maemo from trying to mount it?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I don't know... Best practice is to have a mountable FAT partition so that Maemo has something to mount.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Ok. I have bunzip2'ed the basic-debian-chroot-fs.tar.bz2 so it is a tar. I am unable to tar -xvfp *.tar it to extract the tar with the same permissions. How do I go about doing this? Thanks for answering such a basic question.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

johndoe: Make sure you are extracting from the tar as root. That is essential.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I am extracting as root, but the tar -pxvf command doesn't seem to extract (or any combination). Would you recommend extracting on another computer and moving? Or is their an easier command to extract?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

johndoe: I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but I'm pretty sure you're doing something wrong. Here are the steps again:

1: partition / format your card with at least a small FAT partition and a big ext2 partition. (you can have a swap partition too, and more than one ext2 partition)
2: mount the big ext2 partition on /debian
(e.g.: qmount /dev/mmcblk1p2 /debian )
3: extract the rootfs into the partition mounted on /debian
( cd /debian ; tar xvf /media/mmc1/big-rootfs.tar )
4: unmount the partition
( qumount /debian )
5: run the "debian" command to remount the partition and chroot into it.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Hi! Can you help me? Earlier in EasyDebian was ability to move large windows by pressing "Menu" hardware key(N810), but it vanishes from some moment. How to enable it again?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

shanti: I just checked, you are right, somehow that configuration got lost in the latest version! See, this is what beta-testing is all about. Next version will have this again.

For now, here's how to get it working again.

Edit this file: /home/user/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml

Find the section:

<!-- Keybindings for windows -->

Add the lines:

<keybind key="F4">
<action name="Move"/>
</keybind>

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

hi qole!! I'm successfully using from a while your easydebian package; it's very useful and bring maemo4 to a complete desktop experience!

now, i saw that your package in fremantle, have a method to uniform easydeb apps with the maemo theme; how did you do that?
i use the frediablo theme with the menu tweak and it's very similar to maemo5 how can i imp;lement the debian theme like in maemo5???

thx a lot!!!

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I am currently using the MurrinaNightOrange theme in LXDE. It looks very Fremantle-like :)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2578/...e7154c1d_o.png

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

hi Qole,
first thanks for your work

i have only one problem with my n810 hardware keyboard: everything include locale and xmodmap works perfect, but in hildon i use russian keyboard layout(Ctrl+Chr changes layout), and in lxde i cannot find a useful way to change keyboard layout. i try setxkbmap - it works from terminal window, but i didn't find any working grp_switch key combination and so no way to change layout back to english. PLease give me some advice.

Thanks.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

kpv: I cannot answer that question. Anyone else with some localisation experience? debernardis?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

hi qole, thx for the dvice of the theme!!!

now I have another question;
is there any tweak/setup to speed up the start of openoffice or gimp?? (the only 2 "bigapps" that I run)

and a little off-topic question:
Is there any program that you can advice me that works well on the tablet??
in the dedicated tread, I saw only dillo\links and gparted(wich isn't useful for me)
can you help me??
thx a lot!!

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

yes! i've experienced this. i end up having to resave on the internal memory and later overwriting the old file,

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Just uploaded an version that hopefully (and finally) fixes this. Please check if it's OK now.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

attila77: nope, still broken on dmsetup 2:1.02.27-maemo5.

I removed and installed twice, to make sure, same problem, that pesky /etc/udev/rules.d/65_dmsetup.rules is not being handled correctly... If I delete the file manually, it installs OK.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I don't get it. What's different on your install compared to mine ? Here's how it looks on my N810 both with and without the file.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I just buy new microsd card 16Gb. it works fine, as I see.
I make 2 partitions in Gparted on Ubuntu 9.10 PC in cardreader:
SD - 10Gb and DEB - 5GB, ext2 fs. Extract the contents of debian-squeeze-rootfs.tar.bz2 on DEB partition and plug the card in my N810. Edit ~/.chroot file to point on this partition. Then make "sudo debian" and everything is OK, but last line in output is "segmentation fault" and chroot does not work. dmesg|tail does not show any problems. Working with usual image file seems no problems.
Why can it be?

Seems very strange. I just tried to copy contents from my image file in DEB partition and this works fine. Problem solved :)

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

And also one question. I deleted OpenOffice, right after install Easy Debian. And when I move ED on big partition, I installed OpenOffice back. But now it cannot work, failing with message:
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'com::sun::star::ucb::InteractiveAugmentedIOExcept ion'

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

shanti: I had the same problem after trying to upgrade my OpenOffice installation. I guess the current version in the Sid / Testing repositories is broken (again). Try uninstalling, disabling (commenting out) the sid repos in /etc/apt/sources.list, then reinstalling...

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

@qole: bump ?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

attila77: Could you try uninstalling the dmsetup package and its dependencies and then installing them as a dependency of easy-chroot?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Worksforme. Can you post what you are getting in the console ?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

attila77: try including the kernel modules in your test, maybe that's where the problem is, because it is still broken here.

log attached.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I'm starting to think this is caused by something else. I retraced your steps to the letter (with and without kernel modules loaded) and still no problems. Try removing the packages with --purge, maybe there is some old dirt left in there... It's a bit strange that your dmsetup softlink is dated Sept (you say it works when you delete it manually... but then how does it get recreated with a Sept date ?)

Also, check that you do not have a stuck /var/lib/dpkg/info/dmsetup.preinst , after install it should contain

#!/bin/sh
if [ -e /etc/udev/rules.d/65_dmsetup.rules ] ; then rm /etc/udev/rules.d/65_dmsetup.rules ; fi

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

As your package is the only Extras-aspiring one currently depending on it, I say you promote then when you feel like promoting easy-chroot (not much point having the dm stuff there until then).

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Hmm. --purge just cleans out config and log files and the like. Interesting that it helped the problem though.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I've promoted everything to Extras... except... I can't find the kernel modules package to promote! Can someone help?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Hm, true enough, not on the promoter list... Which means it either got auto-promoted as a dependency (not sure if it works that way for Diablo), or, time to contact Jeremiah/Niels :)

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

So, I did notice a couple of things with my install now that I've had ample time to use it. :)
* Debian Hardware Keys no longer work --- at least not full screen. For example, after running it, pressing minus then full screen within Firefox will just highlight the contents of the address bar. Any ideas on how to fix?
* If I run apps from the Hildon desktop, they run as root. If I run the apps from LXDE, they run as user.
* Also, if I run apps from LXDE, are much slower (due to the overhead maybe?)
* Performance overall is GREATLY improved when using a cloned system with a swap partition.

That's all for now, but help with the fullscreen issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

hordeman: you were right, there was a bug in the debbie script that wasn't running apps as "user", and that broke the HW keys script, too.

New versions of both of my packages are being loaded into Extras-devel, and I'll promote to Extras as soon as I test the install.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Many thanks for this. Tried it yesterday, just a few things I noted:

1) Would an updated image file be possible? The current one (as of yesterday) has ~150mb free space, but requires ~250mb of extra space just to update the existing programs. I personally hit a circular dependency in Synaptic, where Epiphany-gecko 2.23 needed to be removed (dummy package) for Epiphany 2.28 but couldn't due to a broken update-alternatives.

2) What does the performance mode do - put the processor to full speed 100% of the time or something else? A "performance changed" screen would be nice; currently it doesn't tell whether it worked or not.

3) Considering that the minimum card required is 2GB, perhaps more free space could be added to the image file?

4) By default, the various menu items were added to three different folders. Would an "EasyDeb" folder not be tidier?

Edit: Ah well. Thanks for the info anyway :)

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Hibernica:

1) Don't update the image. It isn't meant to be updated. There are many problems with trying to update the image, one the worst of which is the fact that OpenOffice no longer runs. Many of the problems are the fault of the Debian armel Sid distribution, which seems to be in a particularly bad state right now.

2) Performance mode sets the processor governor speed to 400 mHz, so it will always run at full speed, instead of regularly falling back to much lower speeds as it does in the "on demand" speed. It is simply a shell script with no GUI. If you provide an easy way to display a hildon banner from the command line, I will use that method instead.

3) I don't think I should make the N8x0 image any bigger, since the N810 comes with only 2GB onboard. If you want more space, the best thing to do is to partition a card and put the rootfs into the partition.

4) There is no facility that I know of for making new menu folders when installing an app. If there were, I certainly would have done it that way!

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

So.. I've been playing around with easy debian on my n810 for a few days now, trying to breathe some new life into this old device that's been becoming boring. I thought I'd share some of my successes and failures with it.

As for what versions of things I'm using, the easy-debian-whatever package from extras, and the latest debian-squeeze-rootfs from qole's site.

The geometry I decided on is:

(Disclaimer: Don't do this unless you know what you are doing!)

Internal flash
- Default maemo install. Nothing special here

2GB Internal "card"
- 256MB swap partition
- 1.6GB ext2 partition - debian rootfs lives here

8GB External card
- 8GB ext3 partition - for user files

I've read it's recommended to have at least some vfat on the drives, but I don't really see the point, as long as /etc/fstab is set up correctly.

That said, I've noticed a few quirks:
- The external card sometimes auto-mounts to both /media/mmc1 and /media/mmc2. Is there some auto-mounting service that should be disabled in this case?
- The swap partition is not turned on automatically, despite being in fstab. The easy way around it is to just run 'swapon /dev/mmcblk0p1' at bootup. Surely I'm missing something obvious here..

What works:
- Debian chroots extremely fast.
- LXDE is almost faster than the default maemo desktop.
- Pretty much everything I haven't mentioned.
- Obviously, the big apps (GIMP, iceweasel, openoffice) are a bit slow, but tolerable.

What doesn't work, but doesn't really matter:
- Synaptic is slow/hangs/just plain doesn't work. Not really a big deal to just use apt-get instead.
- Have not yet tried sound. Maemo-mplayer is reportedly faster/better, so easy to still use that or something like Canola for media playing.

What doesn't work at all:
- The Fn key does not work in debian. using 'Set Debian HW Keys' seems to have no effect. Is there a hack around this?
- Switch-lxde is really outdated. I've tried doing a simple mount /usr/bin /debian/usr/local/bin, but most apps just throw errors. Is there another clever way to make maemo apps work within the debian chroot (particularly maemo-mapper)?
- Flash in iceweasel does work, but youtube videos don't play properly. Originally I thought "I'll just upgrade flash", but then remembered this is arm, not x86.

My todo list:
- find statusbar app(s) for things like network and battery status (any recommendations here?).
- Try sound. gnome-alsa-mixer at least appears to work.
- Try different window managers (any tips on this?).
- The easy-debian chroot method should work with any rootfs distro for arm. Try some (xubuntu? mer?).
- Get USB host mode to *actually* work in both maemo and debian. Being able to mount an external drive would be very cool (yes I know the onboard usb has very low power output).

Things that would be nice, but are a little unrealistic:
- See if the onboard camera works in debian (any recommended apps to test this with?)
- Get that cool status/notification LED to work from within debian. I think there were actually some pretty low-level scripts for the led at one point?


It may sound like I'm running into lots of little troubles, but so far I'm very happy and impressed at how well this works overall. :)

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

By leaving a small vfat partition on the external card, you give Maemo something to automount. And it does like to automount!

try "touch .synchroot" from ~ before initializing your chroot; this should copy things like the N810's keyboard map to the chroot.

This is a very confusing paragraph. The switch-lxde script (from my repository) is designed to shut down the Hildon desktop and start up the LXDE desktop in its place. It doesn't have anything to do with getting maemo apps working in the chroot. As far as I know, it isn't "outdated"... What's outdated about it? Can you give clear bug reports, so I can fix things? If you can help me fix / update the LXDE desktop replacement project, please post in that thread. The basic Easy Debian package has no scripts for doing anything like that.

I posted two little python scripts that work in conjunction with my Easy Mer project, one for the battery and one for the wlan. You can find them attached here. There's also a menu in the Easy Mer package that lets you run Maemo apps from within the chroot desktop. Install the Easy Mer package to get all three of the scripts.

If you are running LXDE as a secondary desktop, on top of Maemo, you can't really run Maemo apps in the LXDE desktop because they resist being run in display :1.

YouTube used to work in my Easy Debian chroot. Maybe something has changed?

It should work fine as long as you plug it in before opening your chroot.

It works if you find an app that can do V4L2 (and there are surprisingly few apps that can!) and point the app to /dev/video0.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

How to change "motion buffer size" in Xephyr?

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

Possible work-around ? :
On my N810 Ctrl-Chr works in easy-mer.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

[ Using easy-debian from extras and debian-m5-v2-rootfs.tgz ]

It seems that for the N810 keyboard, easy-debian uses the rx-44 file in
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/ , not in
/debian/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/ ??

By accident I finally found a way to get proper swedish umlauts in easy-debian.
Changes to the rx-44 file in the /debian/usr/--- directory hadn't helped,
but then I happened to put the same modified rx-44 file into the /usr/--- directory, and hey presto, I got swedish instead of danish umlauts in leafpad and OOo under easy-debian!
( In the chroot terminal, though, they had always appeared.)

Ctrl-Chr works in easy-mer but not, it seems, in easy-debian, except in the chroot terminal.
So I changed type="EIGHT_LEVEL" chr-maps in the rx-44 file to 4-level, keeping the swedish but deleting the danish umlauts.

EDIT: Or you could reorder the eight characters so that the first four are those you want in easy-debian.

Re: Easy Debian Diablo Beta Testing
 

I will personally gift a full box of Fluffernutters to anyone who attempts to install Scid through Easy Debian.

It only has a couple of dependency issues. :)
Scid