Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hi!

If you have installed Easy Debian, and you are having a problem, please first check the wiki page, then search this thread. If you can't find your answer, feel free to post your question at the end of the thread.

Update 02-Jun-10:

PR 1.2 broke our elegant keyboard fix (press the power button and clear the menu), so Easy Debian 0.9.50 (in Extras-testing) makes it so you just have to hit the Easy Debian icon again to get keyboard again in LXDE.

Update 26-Apr-10:

The new debian-m5-v3d.img.ext2.lzma image file is now the default for the Easy Debian installer. Please let me know if you have issues.

Update 26-Mar-10:

Both Easy Chroot and Easy Debian are now in Extras! Thank you all for your testing and voting!

If you wish to show your thanks for Easy Debian, you can either donate or you can go to the Easy Debian Download Page and give it 5 stars!


Update 09-Mar-10:

OK, I've pushed Easy Debian 0.9.46 and Easy Chroot 0.3.0 to Testing. These packages incorporate all the stuff we've been hacking out together, including the fix to make LXDE theme editing a possibility.

Please test and vote!

Also, if you have any questions (or answers!) please use the Easy Debian wiki page.

Update 22-Jan-2010:

The two essential Easy Debian packages (easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot) are now in the Fremantle Extras repository!

New packages coming to Extras-testing soon... as soon as people stop finding problems ;)


Keyboard problems are mostly solved worked-around. The fastest way to get keyboard in LXDE again is hit the power button and then tap outside the menu. This should restore keyboard to LXDE. (broken in PR 1.2, see above)


I recommend using the Easy Debian image installer (found in your N900s menu after installing Easy Debian) and putting the image in MyDocs.

I have a fairly preliminary image file on my server, but it will do the job for now.

Here are some issues that I need help resolving:

• Keyboard doesn't function in LXDE! Showstopper!
• Dialogs are almost useless under Maemo 5
• Drop-down choosers don't show text using "Beta" theme (see font chooser in OpenOffice Writer)
• GIMP crashes under Maemo when picture is touched with stylus

Beta testers are desperately wanted. Especially testers with some capability of fixing (or helping to fix) the above issues.

Thanks!

EDIT: You can follow my progress quite closely now. I do almost all my development and testing on-device, and use git (via Easy Debian of course) to upload my changes from the N900 to the garage.maemo.org project page. Just go to the git repository (labelled SCM on the project's menu bar) to see what's going on.

Interesting, it looks like you can see the on-device uploads by looking at the user name. If the user name is "user", it was uploaded from the N900.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'd like to help test, I'm not sure I can help fix any of the bugs tho :(

I've been running your debian-squeeze-m5-img.bz2 for a few weeks on the n900 and the only issue i've run into was the locale setting.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

N900 only or N810 testers too?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I need some N8x0 testers too, report results over in this thread.

EDIT: New thread linked above. Go there instead.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'm eager to start hacking on my N900 so once I get the time to set up Easy Debian on my new device I will try to help with beta testing.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I installed your image by downloading and unpacking it manually (had a bad wireless connection from the phone at the time - downloaded in on a laptop and later scp'd to the phone).

First impression - cool, Debian on a mobile phone :-)

The image is installed to MyDocs as per your recommendation. Still, I/O is slow but that's to be expected I guess. Have you tried to chroot directly to an exploded directory structure - ie. skipping the image mounting?

Will report more and try to get some feedback on the issues you mention in the first post.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Yes, waiting for the dm-loop kernel modules to be compiled for Fremantle; this should improve I/O speed to the image file quite a bit.

Yes, search for the many posts explaining how to run this from a dedicated partition rather than an image file. I haven't done that on an N900 yet, because I'm waiting to hear from more experienced hackers how repartitioning the N900 works for them.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

OK, I'll test, I have long experience with running debian on the HTC Universal.

I've been reading through the easy debian threads of yours, but it's very confusing, tons of pages etc.

I'm interested in running it chrooted off of a just a subdir on the MicroSD card, as that'll be fastest.

Can you briefly specify just a rough guide of installing it, as flipping through tens of pages is overwhelming:

Which packages and files necessary and is there a special chrooting technique for them?

Where is your debian rootfs?

If I just wanna expand it then experiment with chrooting it, what are the two packages easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot for?

Haven't inspected them yet, so it occurred to me, you might have them set up so that they download a debian rootfs image, is that so?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Repartitioning doesn't work.

But what I've done is flipped the fs types of mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2, mkfs switching them, the huge one was FAT, made it ext3 and vice versa.

Then mount them upon boot. Only the /home (i.e. ext3) will automount (the fstab is autogenerated upon every boot), you have to edit /etc/event.d/rcS-late and add the option to mount /home/user/MyDocs (the FAT one) - without this and a FAT system on it, the camera will not record pics.

Anyhow this way you get around 24 Gigs of ext3 in /home that's useable for any directory with chroot.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Is there a way to reset fonts to "desktop" size in pixels? This should solve dialogs problem. And Openoffice requires heavy tuning to save screen space.