Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

guyes hi , i have 1.2 gigabyte for installable applications. so that means that i cant install easy debian(wich requires 2gb at least ) right? thnx in advance

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

The easy debian image (the 2 GB one) does not reside in the 2 GB /opt partition. It rests in the 32 GB MyDocs partition.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

so i can install it without any problem thnx!!!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Correct. As long as you have more than 2 GBs free in the MyDocs partition. Though I advise you to download the image from a computer and copying and pasting over USB than using the install method on the N900. It takes a llooonnnnggg time to download 2 GBs even over wifi.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

You'll need about 2.5 GB in /home/user/MyDocs where you have all your data and media. The easy debian chroot application itself is very small.

EDIT: 3 posts while I was slowly typing mine, wow.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

hehe ,So where can i download it? is this the one located at downolads >system > easy debian?? i would like to have a full debian OS with a terminal and all the applications that i can get :P ,,

but i guess this isnt possible right?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It is a full Debian system, just in a chroot. For detailled installation instructions see http://wiki.maemo.org/Easy_Debian

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

y i ve read all of it , but i havent figure out what is a chroot ?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

This has some background information, although it's not up-to-date regarding the N900:

http://qole.blogspot.com/2009/03/eas...for-maemo.html

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

thnx m8 i ll read that right away. Can u plz tell me where can i get the full 2.5 easy debian for n900 image?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Seems you should read the wiki once again ;) The 2 GB image is what you get after downloading and extracting the compressed image from qole.org.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

thnx again for ur time , but i am realy confuced where to get the latest image from qole.org/files there are lots of files :O

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

First off, I'm sorry if this got covered before, but I couldn't find anything on the Wiki page or through my trusty stalker friend Google.

I have a minor issue with running an application with debbie - namely the wonderful Eric I installed a couple of hours before. It works like a charm in LXDE and will probably be heavily used by me once I managed to map the keyboard in a way that covers all the characters needed for Python development... ;)

Sadly, while it almost seems like Eric was especially designed to run with debbie (gracefully resizes to a comfortable workspace), I can't get it to accept ANY keyboard input at all.

Keyboard works fine with Eric in LXDE, and all the other applications I tried with debbie show no sign of keyboard problems, either.

Does anyone have any ideas on why the keyboard breaks with only this ONE application and only in debbie mode at that?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Your are right. I have to run it twice to get writer to start in a few seconds. While I would still consider this an improvement (although not quite as significant) there seems to be a problem with the quickstarter option. If I run OO.o writer, cleanly exit out of OO.o writer (and OO.o), shutdown LXDE, restart LXDE and try to run OO.o writer it doesn't start up anymore. I have to turn off the N900 and start over to get OO.o writer to run again in LXDE. If I disable the quickstarter option the problem goes away but then I'm basically back at the previous start up speeds for OO.o...

See if you get the same.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

When i try to install easy debian a message apears that i dont have wget installed...but...when i try to instal wget it say iincompatible application package...any ideas ?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

The most recent Debian image is http://qole.org/files/debian-m5-v3d.img.ext2.lzma and is referred to in the manual installation instructions in the wiki by the link "here".

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

wget should get pulled in by installing easy-deb-chroot. When I do a dry-run to reinstall it, I see nothing wrong. What errors did you get precisely?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I was tryng to install wget.deb file downloaded from my computer.When i was tryng to intall the deb from my phone i receive "incompatible application package".I solved this with apt-get :D works like a charm

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I've installed eric and verified your problem. I see that keyboard input gets sent to XTerminal from where I started eric and not to eric.

qole, any idea of how to fix that?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

One more refinement to this process. The problem arises after you turn off the n900 (having cleanly shut down LXDE). Once you turn on the n900, OO will work, using quickstarter, in LXDE until you shutdown and restart. LXDE.

I'm currently using the squeeze version of OO. I'm not sure if this is a probem with 3.1 or earlier versions

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I also have this phenomenon. Even when it wouldn't start any longer in LXDE, there is no problem with debbie. In order to have OO start again in LXDE, I need to do a closechroot before restarting LXDE. (So no need to reboot the device at least)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Doing a closechroot worked. Thanks for suggestion.
Now the first start up of OO is 20s from LXDE and about 3s to 4s the second try. Although a minor thing, hopefully the closeroot step can be ommited at some point.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Sigh. Eric must be another app that has "broken" keyboard focus.

I thought that you have to do the same trick to Eric that you do to Xephyr when starting LXDE. But I installed eric4 and tried to get the keyboard to work with fixkbdfocus, qobi-wmhint-fix, and set-focus, none of which seemed to work.

Probably eric4 suffers from the same problems as qobi was experiencing with emacs, and it might need his method for solving it... Although I think that is already one of the two programs that I tried (qobi-wmhint-fix and set-focus).

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

How hard is it to associate ODF files with Easy Debian OOo?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Check out dbus-switchboard and look at the end of this thread for help.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It is possible to run full version of debian/linux mint/ubuntu ? and how ?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

OK, that was hard to figure out, but easy to implement.

These are the basic steps as of right now:

1. Enable extras-devel and install dbus-switchboard
2. Restart the device
3. In Maemo's File Manager, clik on a .odt file (for example).
4. In the select application list select dbus switchboard.

And that is it, your file is opened with OOo Writer.

Now, I have to figure out how to make last step unnecessary. If someone can give me a tip it will be much appreciated.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Sadly, that doesn't seem to work for me - though it might just as well be because I'm not sure I fully understood the instructions. Despite being a developer I'm still a terrible noob when it comes to OS specific things. :D

Guess I'll just have to wait until a different fix (or some idiot proof way for using the current ones) surfaces that actually works with Eric. Until then I'll just enjoy it from within LXDE.

Though, correct me if I got this wrong - using it from within will not allow for instant testing, since there's no way to get access to the Maemo python instance?

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help, rebhana & qole!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Actually, that's no problem at all. Just save your work in a subdirectory of /home/user and it is accessible from both Debian and Maemo.

So just keep a Maemo terminal open and you can run your python programs from there. Flip back and forth with the Ctrl-backarrow.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Sweet, I didn't even realise this works from within LXDE - once again, thanks qole! That makes for a perfect workflow now. :)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

In case you're wondering what the update in Extras-devel is about, I removed the MurrinaNightOrange theme from the Easy Debian package and MohammedAG made a new package for it. The Easy Debian package now depends on the new murrinanightorange package. He wants to use it in a couple of his projects but it was conflicting with Easy Debian.

EDIT: For some reason, my version themed any commands called with sudo, which I really liked. The new separate package no longer does this. Does anybody know why that would happen?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It's now possible to make a bluetooth keyboard and mouse work fully in N900 Easy Debian. You need to hack a bunch of stuff to get it to work (see especially this post, this post and this thread), but I'm hoping to package this up for those wanting the Pocket Computer experience.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Ok so I put easy debian on and love the fact that I have real linux (sorry maemo but busy box?) now to learn from. I have even done an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and nothing broke. I do have 2 questions...

1) I have learned from tinkering that I can get logged in as root and directly into /root by typing debsu from maemo, and that I can bring the chroot closed by typing closechroot from maemo. But if I fire up debian through the desktop icon, it plops me into / not /root and if I cd ~ I am in /home/user, not in /root like the debsu command put me. Is there a way to have easy-deb-chroot plop me in as root in the /root directory when I use the desktop icon as opposed to having to do debsu from within the maemo terminal?

2) I tried from within debian to run the update-rc.d command to have some services I installed (such as mysql server and sendmail) start when I activate the chroot. but the command
"update-rc.d mysql enable" does not do the trick. It reports that it is creating links to /etc/init.d but still if I log out and bring debian down (either from the desktop app or by running closechroot) and then go back into debian, the service is not started. I am going to make a guess that since this in chroot that the scripts are not even getting read?

anyway it would be great to have both of these issues worked out as I am trying to make the debian chroot mimic a true linux environment (being in /root and having certain services started) as much as I can. after all the entire reason I bought this phone was to learn linux....

thanks for listening.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

extendedping:

1. In Maemo, as root, edit the /usr/share/applications/hildon/debchroot.desktop file to have the following Exec line:

That will get the debsu behaviour from the icon.

2. See the startup scripts section in the wiki for information on starting services when you open the chroot.

HINT: You probably want $CHROOT/var/run/onfirstchroot.rc

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

thanks, going to look at these things now...

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Sorry it's taken so long to reply - I was expecting an email to inform me that there had been posts on this thread.

I'm using version 3.2.1-4 from sid.

Apparently something has changed. I just loaded up one file and sure enough my N900 crashed. But since then I've only been able to get OO to crash, with the N900 staying alive. I don't know whether some update has made Maemo more stable now. I can't send you the file that did make it crash because it's the original work of a colleague and I'd need, at the least, to get her permission first.

But let me attach a file that consistently makes OO crash, and in the past has also made N900 crash. It basically happens when you scroll down to the bullet points. I had to upload it as a .zip as .odt's can't be attached.

FWIW it seems that the armel build of OO has some known problems. They've taken openoffice.org-base out of the repository as it didn't work at all. Possibly this is all something to report as a debian bug.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I have tried your file in my OO version 3.2.1-3, which is the current version in squeeze and I don't get any crashes.

I noticed the newer version in sid, but didn't install it after I saw that a rather larger number of other packages would get upgraded to sid as well. So perhaps the problem is with those. In that case it might be best to start all over with your Debian installation and only upgrade to squeeze packages.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I guess that means that easy-deb-chroot with Maemo-side fixed scripts will remain in devel or testing somewhat longer, because promotion will depend on those additional packages now, but anyhow, it's perhaps an advantage to have two installable versions, one with Maemo-side and one with Debian-side fixes of the keyboard focus. Both have their advantages imo - the Maemo-side improvements give a better integration of Easy Debian windows, while the Debian-side improvements are more deterministic.

qole, whenever you have nothing better to do, I would suggest producing a new Debian image where the Debian-side fixes are included, together with an upgrade to the squeeze version of OO, since that is working fine at the moment, while sid seems to have introduced new problems. (If you have the 1:3.2.0 version, I would even suggest that. It is a bit faster than the newer 1:3.2.1, and users would then have the choice between that and the current squeeze version.)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Since this is my first post to this thread, I'd firstly like to thank everyone involved (especially qole), but thanking everyone would take forever.

I am running into some problems though.


I second the idea that the wiki should include further explanation on Xephyr. I'd volunteer, but I'm currently lost, running two separate chroot partitions on external SD: one to load with bootmenu, and one to load from maemo with Xephyr.

I'd like to consolidate this into one simple partition, but...

The easy-debian partition won't boot from bootmenu-n900, and the debbootstrap partition won't load in Xephyr. The post I quoted doesn't quite fix this. I installed all the packages referenced.

For my bootable debian partition, when I call the debian-lxde script from easy-deb-chroot 0.9.53-1freemantle1, a window with a pointer shows up ( DISPLAY=:1 ), and then the terminals I've set to start in /root/.xsession load in separate windows ( DISPLAY=:0 ). The window manager (fluxbox) never loads. Otherwise it works fine if I use the easy-debian partition.

(EDIT: I can start the window manager from a chroot terminal however.)


For my easy-debian partition, I set an item in /etc/bootmenu.d/, but it never loads past the bootmenu screen. Otherwise it works fine from the bootstrapped partition.


Also, I am trying to find out how to mount and modify Maemo JFFS/NAND from a bootmenu setup, (so I don't have to reflash when I screw up something simple in Maemo). It would be very nice to have easy-debian setup for this purpose.

Any help would be appreciated as always.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I would suggest creating a new wiki page for such advanced topics as bootable Debian and then linking to that in the Easy Debian page. Otherwise the Easy Debian wiki might become prohibitively heavy reading, in particular for new users.