Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

LibreOffice is available in wheezy and I guess since the release is not that long ago it should also work in squeeze. But I'm not sure if it will work in lenny or a lenny /squeeze mix (which ED is based on).
I'll check that.

@qole:
Do you see any chances to release an image purely based on squeeze anytime soon or do you have a solution for the libncurses5 problem when trying to do a complete dist-upgrade to squeeze?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Has anyone tried disabling swap on the EMMC to improve Debian performance?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

What is the problem with libncurses5?

As far as I'm aware, packages that should not be upgraded to squeeze include gconf2 and libpulse0.

It would indeed be great to be able to move on to new-stable Debian, but I guess qole already tried. So I'm afraid we have to live with hybrid lenny-squeeze-wheezy installations.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Any chance the name of the squeeze repository could be changed to squeezy. Then we would depend on lenny-squeezy-wheezy.

Sorry, I had to do that...

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I mentioned this in another thread about compilers but thought it might be of interest as it pertains to easy debian.

I recently found that the debian repositories have gfortran which is a gnu project version of fortran 95 . I downloaded it using synaptic and ran some simple tests (do loops that summed up stuff, printing "hello world" and so forth). It worked with no problem.

The repositores also have f2c which converts fortran to c. I tried that as well on a fortran code and then compiled the c version with gcc. Worked like a charm.

I just have to marvel at the capabilities that easy debian brings to the n900. Thanks!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I do not get installed.

What repository turn on / off? and the steps please.

Thanks.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

short version:
Upgrading libncurses5 breaks the Debian image and Maemo's Easy Debian installation.

long version:
When I started using ED Lenny was still stable and I prefer to use a pure Debian stable. However Squeeze was already in freeze for some time and I thought upgrading the whole ED installation to Squeze should be a good idea. So I upgraded to Squeeze but ED froze during the upgrade. I had to kill it from Maemo.
When trying to restart ED via the launcher icon it didn't start, so I tried from a terminal. Unfortunately I don't remember the error message but basically it was saying that Maemo's ED was broken. So I reinstalled ED and tried again. ED started but from within Debian I received an error message about a broken libncurses.so.5 and I didn't even get to a console login. I couldn't fix this with fsck. The image was broken so I had to restore my backup from before the dist-upgrade.
My image was highly customized at that time so I thought that there might be a problem with some dependencies. I tried a 2nd time with a vanilla ED image but got the same libncurses5 problem. Then I tried a 3rd time with an image that was pretty much stripped down to only run LXDE, but the problem still existed. Unfortunately one can't get rid of libncurses5 if one wants to keep a working Debian.

I'm fine with Lenny as long as it gets support, but I don't like release mixes. You always have to watch out for dependency problems.
Frankly I was pretty shocked when I had the first look at ED's sources.list: Lenny + Squeeze + multimedia for both releases. I figured out that multimedia was necessary for working audio, but I'd prefer to have only one release in there.

btw:
Does anybody know why audacity crashes when stopping a playback? Until then it works fine but both, the versions from Lenny and Squeeze crash when clicking the stop button. Unfortunately I have no other ARM system to check if this is a bug in the Debian package.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

lets talk omap hardware acceleration in easy debian....

i know easy debian uses a nested x server but if i launch an ed application from maemo using the 'debbie' command i bypass that. i can successfully get mplayer to play SOME videos doing this.

so are there any omap hw acceleration drivers available for us to use in e.d.? ideally some va-api backends. i've searched but couldn't find anything, so am close to giving up.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

leetnoob: perhaps you could figure out a way to hack in the dsp-accelerated gstreamer plugins from Maemo, and use a gstreamer-based player. This would basically amount to using the Maemo media player in Easy Debian. So anything that is hardware accelerated in Maemo would also be accelerated in Debian.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

you just beat me to it, i can see that we actually have xv hardware acceleration in e.d. so the next thing is getting maemo-esque gstreamer support. i take it this hasn't been tried before...? are the maemo gstreamer bits and debs available in any maemo sdk repositories?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Which way can I invoke mplayer in maemo rootfs /usr/bin/mplayer from a program running into the chroot? (namely iceweasel)
There is an extension to see italian tv which uses mplayer as its backend. The extension doesn't install in microb or fennec either, but installs on iceweasel, but I need to tell it how to reach the proper, hw accelerated mplayer.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

debernardis: I'm not aware of any way to do this, except copying the Maemo mplayer (and any dependencies) into the chroot. That's an ugly, trial-and-error process that may not work.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

i'm trying to get gstreamer hw acceleration working in ed at the moment. in the meantime can i suggest you check out kmplayer with the worldtv plugin on maemo.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

fsck yeah! got it working. watching hw accelerated movie playback with sound using the totem media player. now i have to go back and repeat things so i can figure out what i did. give me a day or so to refine it.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

ok, here's the easy debian hardware acceleration premier:

FROM A MAEMO PROMPT/TERMINAL

cd /home/user/MyDocs
mkdir gstfiles
cd gstfiles
cp /usr/lib/libOMX_Core.so .
cp /usr/lib/libOMX.TI.Video.Decoder.so .
cp /usr/lib/libOMX.TI.JPEG.encoder.so .
cp /usr/lib/libLCML.so .
cp /usr/lib/libbridge.so.2 .
cp /usr/lib/libImagePipeline.so .
cp /usr/lib/libgstfarsight-0.10.so.0 .
cp /usr/lib/libcapl.so .
cp /usr/lib/libnice.so.0 .
cp /usr/lib/libWildMidi.so.0 .

cd /usr/lib

tar -cvf /home/user/MyDocs/gstfiles/gst.tar gstreamer-0.10

cd /lib

tar -cvf /home/user/MyDocs/gstfiles/dsp.tar dsp

NOW OPEN THE EASY DEBIAN ROOT TERMINAL BY CLICKING ON THE SWIRLY ICON AND TYPE THE FOLLOWING COMMANDS INTO EASY DEBIAN

cd /home/user/MyDocs
cd gstfiles
cp libOMX_Core.so /usr/lib
cp libOMX.TI.Video.Decoder.so /usr/lib
cp libOMX.TI.JPEG.encoder.so /usr/lib
cp libLCML.so /usr/lib
cp libbridge.so.2 /usr/lib
cp libImagePipeline.so /usr/lib
cp libgstfarsight-0.10.so.0 /usr/lib
cp libcapl.so /usr/lib
cp libnice.so.0 /usr/lib
cp libWildMidi.so.0 /usr/lib

cd /lib
tar -xvf /home/user/MyDocs/gstfiles/dsp.tar
cd /
tar -xvf /home/user/MyDocs/gstfiles/gst.tar

now install the totem media player in easy debian

apt-get install totem

to watch hw accelerated movies:

FROM A MAEMO TERMINAL

debbie "export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10:/gstreamer-0.10;sudo -E totem"

let me know how it goes.

notes: you cannot do this from the easy debian lxde desktop.
also click the 'close debian' icon when finished as i've noticed doing 'umount /media/mmc1' from maemo results in MAEMO saying it cannot umount '/.debian/media/mmc1', i'd be interested if qole could take a look at this last point. nothing else seems wrong just the umount command without a sudo. and clicking the close debian icon fixes it if youre worried about it. but as i said i'd be interested in qole's opinion on this umount quirk.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

mplayer isn't hardware accelerated, even on maemo. if you follow the instructions above you get a totem player which is hardware accelerated. if your plugin allows you to choose a player, choose totem, if it doesn't you can try renaming the totem executable to mplayer (assuming you don't have mplayer installed in easy debian)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Well, Maemo mplayer has some hardware acceleration (it is better tuned for the ARM architecture than "stock" Debian mplayer); but it does not have DSP support.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

it might have some software tweaks for arm, and it does indeed perform better than e.d. mplayer, but i think the only actual hardware acceleration is xv where it gets each frame displayed by hw acceleration , but the hard part is constructing each frame , which it still only does via software. e.d. mplayer can also take advantage of xv when launched via debbie, but because it's lacking the software tweaks in ffmpeg decoding it doesn't perform as well.

but you've given me an idea for a killer totem set up: we now have gst hardware acceleration , so if we can use the optimised ffmpeg libraries and the gst-ffmpeg plugin we can have as good a media player backend as anything on maemo.

actually i seem to remember a 'maemo' option in the configure options when compiling ffmpeg for e.d. a while back, so it may be as easy as selecting that and compiling as normal.

stay tooned...

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Unfortunately totem doesn't do the job, and it seems that mplayer is strictly required. I'll look into exporting mplayer from maemo to the chroot.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

You should find gfortran-4.3 in the lenny repository. Once enabled, just start synaptic and type gfortran in the search box. It will show you a list of related programs. Look for gfortran-4.3 and select it to download. I think gcc is one of its dependencies so it will be included with the download. Once installed, gfortan wil be in \usr\bin so make sure you specify the path when compiling. Also make sure the fortran program you want to compile has a f95 extension or it will not compile.

For example

\usr\bin\gfortran-4.3 program.f95 -o program

will make a fortran 95 executable called program.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: You don't have to be in LXDE to compile or run a program. Just open xterm and type debbie-sue. Then proceed as usual. Note, when using debbie-sue, you will be put in /home/user.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hi there,
I would like to know if there is a way to get a USB keyboard to work within LXDE apps. At the moment I the alphabet works but not the number/special characters such as @!#$%^

Within maemo I'm using extkbd to get the special characters/numbers to work, and was hoping that this behaviour is carried forward to easy debian. Thanx

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

mdziaf:

My bluetooth hid scripts include support for Easy Debian. Probably the only advantage they have over Extkbd. I have a line that sets up the keyboard mapping for display :1 as well as for the primary display...

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Thanx for that qole. I will give it a go.

Edit:

I've installed the BT HID script, but it is not working for me.
Numbers/special characters are not working

Also now I have a cursor that does not go away even after the hidemouse (if this is too off topic I will post it on the BT HID Thread instead)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Libreoffice wish I could use instead of Openoffice.

I can not get Easy Debian install.

Can you help me install it?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

hi someone has solved the problem of the restarts? i've tried with the power kernel without solution... :(

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hi just want to report on my experience with this issue.

Basically I have been trying to install wxmaxima on ED. This was successful the first time and it was working for about 6 months or basically since I bought N900. Then a few days ago I was playing with some stuff and managed to rm -Rf MyDocs, so reflashed everything.

First when trying to install ED, my phone would turn off or at least become unresponsive during the unzipping. When turning it on again image was only half unzipped. This happened several times with both v3d and v3e. Eventually I unzipped on PC.

Next I did my customizations and then installed wxmaxima among others, successful. I left ED open for 1 hour and went away, when I came back it had closed (or maybe phone rebooted). The image wouldn't boot any more, so I copied the fresh image from PC again.

This time first thing I did was to "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get instlal wxmaxima" (from inside ED). Went away for 1 hour again, when I came back my phone was off. When I turned it on wxmaxima was not installed and would not install, with the symptoms described earlier in this thread. chkdsk and fsck (from friend's mac) wouldn't fix the errors.

Then I found this thread. So I copied fresh image over and tried "sudo umount /media/mmc1". Unmounting failed until I killed hildon-thumbnailerd - dunno why that was accessing my SD card for 15 minutes. Then "debbie sudo apt-get blah blah" in X terminal.

Contrary to what was claimed earlier unmounting SD card did NOT work, i.e. N900 was found to be off 1 hour later with same problems. I then physically removed the card and tried again. This did NOT work either.

By then I was getting really annoyed after having redownloaded about 3 gigs of files in the past 12 hours. So this time I added "-d" to apt-get then backed up the image. Then tried to install again, this time I also tried "nice -n 19 debbie ..." as recommended earlier. (I didn't do this at first because I thought removing the SD card would fix the problem). As I had access to my friend's macbook (my PC has no wifi) I remembered I could ssh.

Now I kept waking up the phone every time the screen turned off. About 10 minutes into the install, the phone was unresponsive and screen went off but ssh was still connected. I typed "top" but no response. Pulling the lever on the side did nothing but then one minute later a frozen screen came on again, then the output of top came onto the ssh. My advanced-clock-plugin seconds only updated every minute or so. This happened for about 10 minutes but in the end the install worked.

Battery was always connected to charger or PC during the above events.

So my advice would be to keep backing up ED image. Try removing SD card first, use nice, and backup after any big download so you don't have to wait for slow servers over and over.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Wow, no wonder interest in Easy Debian has dropped off. If lots of people are having these kinds of problems, I don't blame them.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

pali's new patched kernel has some significant improvements i did a full apt get upgrade and the phone did reboot but had upgraded about 3 quarters of everything with all catalogs open gona test some more but its looking good for a 1st attempt
i found before turning the screen stays lit when charging option works wonders with this aswell for some reason when screen goes to standby the problems become more prominant

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

i can't get it to work; if i try to use the image installer it freezes forever then the N900 reboots with MyDocs mounted as readonly, and with the image extracted by a desktop machine and transmitted via sftp over WiFi with the speed throtled way down in order to avoid triggering the unresponsiveness followed by reboot and fs corruption issue things don't seem to be done right even though the size of the extracted image file looks right, lxde doesn't load (in previous try it opened but was messed up)

Before i had an older version of ED installed and working (never managed to get 3d nor 3e to install back then), but i recently had to reflash, now without Maemo Synaptic reinstalling **** has been a real PITA :(







Would it be possible to make the image install process be easier on the device (throttle the disk I/O way down) so the device won't go unresponsive, much less crash-reboot and **** the fs?


Btw, what is the su password inside the chroot? I tried both my maemo root pw and empty pw but it doesn't let me in....

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'm having similar problems......random reboots and cant upgrade. I get problems with various files in /var/lib/dpkg and stale files...whatever that means.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

This is really a shame. For me, Easy Debian has many features you find in a typical linux environment that maemo, via xterm, does not have (at least as far as I know...). For example, I wanted to look at a jpeg file and did not know how to display it using xterm so I just used the "debbie-sue" command and then used "display file.jpeg" to see the file. Anyways, I hope this problem is fixed so that Easy Debian continues to improve. It is a wonderful work.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

sudo su
passwd

you can also change the maemo root password like that.. but just remember if you are connected directly to the internet you are open to being attacked

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

We're still experimenting over in this thread.

It seems the best thing to do to speed up heavy I/O, and avoid reboots during decompression, is to put your Debian image on a SD card. The next best thing is to put your swap on an SD card.

The simplest thing that seems to work for me is to make a little script, call it swaponoff or something, with two lines:

chmod +x swaponoff
sudo ./swaponoff
(then do the thing you were about to do)

I'll add this to the installer (just before the decompression) and upload it as a new version.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Easy Debian 0.9.55 now has a new script that "resets" the swap, which seems to fix the hour-to-decompress problem on the image installer. So the image should decompress reasonably quickly now.

Please test the script for other problematic situations, such as installing large apps in the chroot using apt-get.

Try installing apps that would crash the system when installing before, but this time, close all of your open apps (except the chroot terminal of course) and browser windows just before starting the install, open a Maemo terminal and run:
Please report your results!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I discovered that my hack only works when Swappolube is installed and enabled. You'll need to have it installed, too, until I figure out Swappolube's magic setting(s).

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Ok version 0.9.56 adds a second script, nr_requests_setup, that seems to fix the decompression problem even when Swappolube is disabled.

So now you have to run two commands the first time (after a reboot):
After that, each time you are about to do something "big", just issue the "sudo swapoffon" command.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It's working great for me :)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

swapoff /dev/mmcblk0p3 rebooted my N900 and removed my desktop widgets - but their position was saved so it was easy to restore them. Apparently this happens when the process hildon-home is stopped.

Also I think this may be more of an I/O problem to the MyDocs partition, as sometimes when I have been backing up the ED image the windows copy dialog reports 45 minutes remaining. If I restart the device and try again it only takes 5 minutes. It feels the same as when I am unable to connect to PC as the device storage is in use, even though I am not doing anything. I tried lsof to see if anything else is accessing the MyDocs partition but it reports nothing. Any other ways?

Also Is it safe to unmount MyDocs and perform fsck when the N900 is running? Windows chkdsk doesn't do anything, maybe the copying out the fsck from ED will work better.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Oh well I am giving up for a bit as I have uni exams coming up. My ED image still boots and it now runs all the programs I need, though any intensive disk activity causes the whole N900 to reboot. Spent about 6 hours trying to resize my ED image to 1GB but even running cp for 10 minutes causes it to die (can't use resize2fs as the image has errors from each reboot and running e2fsck just makes it unbootable).

I guess I need to partition my SD card and maybe MyDocs as well so they can use ext2 as FAT sux. Something to do over summer after I make a linux PC..

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hi zero,

To me, this sounds as if you have more problems than just Easy Debian. Perhaps you have a third-party desktop widget that is misbehaving?

I've found that I can fsck the MyDocs partition without even unmounting it, unlike ext2 partitions.