Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

By the end of the month will be Wheezy stable
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgre...ng=wheezy-sort

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I hope someone will look at bugs submitted by us, then. sulu, do you think that glibc thing preventing gparted (and possibly, some other, still unknown things) t from working, qualify for upstream bug report, too?

/Estel

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Please excuse my silly noob questions. I have only just discovered the joys of ED and spent the weekend and a bit fiddling with it and must say that IT IS FANTASTIC!

In trying to tweak it to my exact liking I have come across a few questions that I have not found answers to yet (yes, I have read TFM when I ran out of options, but doesn't everybody? :)).

So, here goes:

1) Iceweasel runs fine, even though it took me a while to get the shortcut actually appear. I do not know what I did to make it eventually appear; as far as I know, I followed the same procedure about 300 times (create the .desktop file, reboot) with no effect. After an attempt number 301 it suddenly appeared. Weird. Perhaps Catorise Plus has something to do with it. However, the real question is this. It throws an error on startup complaining about misconfiguration and then starts in funeral colours. When run from a command line, it says,
It is true that I had uninstalled the offending theme but I have also reconfigured LXDE to use a different one. Synaptic does not complain about the missing theme, only Iceweasel and Alsa Mixer. Where is the config file to make them use the default theme instead?

2) I do not intend to use ED to play music or videos, so I assume I can remove the relevant packages to save space, right? Perhaps I should have started with an empty image and build my way up rather than cutting my way down, but it's a bit late now...

3) Similarly, I am happy to ditch LXDE and use debbie for everything. Will OO, Iceweasel and the like continue working?

4) Do I really need network manager, wicd and wireless tools if ED uses the Maemo infrastructure to access the network? What is the absolute minimum I need for the network to work?
I think I've managed to answer it myself. Looks like I need at least wicd (plus dependencies). Network manager is not required.

I am slowly chewing my way through all the 291 pages of this thread but it might take a while. So sorry if my questions have already answered. A thread search did not bring up what I was after.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Yes, you can ditch it. BTW, it seems to me, that you're using outdated lenny/squeeze mix version. Currently, there are few stable version of ED fully dist-upgrade'd to Squeeze available (including barebone ones, where you would rather add things that interest you, instead of removing), and even experimental wheezy builds (with major problems inside, yet to be resolved).

Considering that you're willing to spend some work customizing, you may re-think basing it on already available Squeeze image. Or go though pain of dist upgrading yourself, as after that, half of your configs will get overwritten, or messed/unusable, if you decide to keep them in original form.

There shouldn't be any problems with it - except fact, that some programs (iceweasel, chromium), doesn't ever show right-click menu, when fullscreen, if runf rom within maemo (debbie and friends). To get them work properly with fullscreen, you need to run them from LXDE.

Once, I had habit of running resource-intensive things from Maemo itself, avoiding LXDE as middle-man, to save resources. Hoever, in practice _ much to my surprise - everything works exactly as fast (or as slow) in LXDE, if not faster. I have no idea why, maybe it have something to do with Xephyr optimizations, or whatsnot.

You don't need any of them, as it's chroot, so Maemo provides access. Hoever, there is a sad twist in debian packaging - if you remove network manager, apt-get will force you to install wicd, if you remove wicd afterwards, it will force you to install network manager. Then, you will have *both* wicd and network manager working, due to some bug in wicd de-installation (so it won't be installed for apt, but will be still present and working on system).

Only one way to get rid of them is manually delete files, or create fake network-manager (& friends) packages, containing nothing (dummies), that will replace real ones

Hope it save you some nn hours of getting hit by that bugs yourself and another couple of debugging, why the hell such bizzare things happne, and how to fix it ;)

/Estel

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Thanks, Estel. I found some quirks with wicd/network manager inter-dependencies last night during a pruning exercise: I kept pruning until I lost the network and had to install things back manually. I had to install wicd and dependencies, but synaptic was happy with network manager missing.

Unfortunately, I kept fiddling with it and synaptic froze on me to the point that I had to pull the battery out. Needless to say, my Debian image ended up FUBAR so I will have to start all over. I guess I will start with a barebone image this time.

BTW I started off with w3e and upgraded to pure Squeeze bus as I say, that's all history now.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Has a workaround been found for this? I have just been hit by that. It was not too difficult to get out of that (though it did involve a liberal dose of typing sudo, umount and mount) but something like locking SD and MyDocs to prevent mass storage mode while ED is chrooted seems like an obvious solution.

What would be the pros and cons of installing ED in a directory on optfs? Not a loopback, not a separate partition, just a separate directory. One obvious advantage I can think of is that both Maemo and ED would share the same free disk space, resulting in less wastage. Are there any obvious drawbacks?

(Sorry if answered already; I can't claim having read all 291 pages thoroughly but a quick browse did not show anything.)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Very interesting idea - after all, it's "just" a chroot jail... I'm not aware of any such attempts being made before, and from top of my head, I can't give any drawbacks (except for that ED easychroot scripts might need modifications, to allow using regular directory, instead of image file or partition).

Maybe other people know something that I might have overlooked?

/Estel

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Well, I've done it. Expanded the optfs partition (by the way, you do not need a PC to do it: at the cost of two reboots, my N900 could do it under its own steam, with only Parted coming to an aid) and copied ED under /home/debian. It required minor edits in three scripts although in retrospect, I think I could have done with even less.

The most annoying problem was that CloseChroot rebooted the device. The reason was the -m option in fuser. Any idea what it was there for? It seems to work fine without it, whether I use /home/debian or a loopback image.

Conclusions:

• It might be a placebo effect, but it seems to run MUCH faster than from an image. OpenOffice starts about twice as fast. I have no explanation for this. I would imagine that the startup sequence was limited by the CPU and memory speed, not IO, but there you go.
• Already mentioned sharing of disk space, meaning less wasted space. It has, however, two side effects:
  • BackupMenu backup of optfs now includes my ED too.
  • Looking for things using find takes that much longer.

The only potential disadvantage I can think of is that by sharing the file systems,, any corruption is shared too.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It's not placebo, running from native filesystem instead of image file on vfat is *much* faster, and proven so, by some tests with timer. Huge programs like LibreOffice or Chromium/Iceweasel have shitload of I/O (well, rather O) at starting.
---

Nice to hear, that you've managed to do it without problems. Could you, for refference, list changes in scripts you've done?

/Estel

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Some changes: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...postcount=2884
And then you need edit your /home/user/.chroot file
IMGFILE=none
CHROOT=/path/to/your/chroot/folder

Now you start and end your chroot session with old commands ( debian and closechroot ).