easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

Hello,

I'm sort of an advanced Debian user, but I'm still a complete beginner on my 2 days old N900, and although I googled a lot I couldn't find something that addresses my problem:

I have Easy Debian installed and running successfully, but the top panel of maemos hildon is still displayed above the Debian "window", pushing it some pixels downwards so that not all of the 480 vertical pixels can be seen. In roxterm approximately the two bottom lines are invisible.
I think this is a different problem than the commonly found "easy debian not running in full screen" threads.
Can anybody please tell me how I can make the whole display available to Debian or point me to some how-to that describes that?
Thanks!

Two other things:
1. As far as I understand Easy Debian has no middle or right click support so far. I think this could be addressed with xbindkeys and xdotool. xbindkeys can start a program via key presses (or combinations). This program could be xdotool which is able to simulate mouse clicks. This way one could for example bind fn + click to middle click and shift + click to right click. Any thoughts on that? If I'm trying to reinvent the wheel, please give me a link!

2. I assume there will be a new image once Squeeze is stable. Would it be possible to provide a minimalistic image with just lxde-core and the special tweaks that make Easy Debian work at all (mounts, scripts, xephyr etc.) but without additional software like openoffice, gimp or epiphany-browser?
I could do this on my own, but since I've learned in the past few days how much work is behind Easy Debian, I'd really appreciate a pre-built image.

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

With "Set Deb HW Keys" and xbindkeys Debian offers the possibility to make any Debian application full screen. See the wiki for more info. Also, you'll get more chances for feedback by posting to qole's Easy Debian Beta Testing thread!

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

Thanks for your answer!
I sorted out the fullscreen problem by simply using the latest Debian image. Somehow I got an old one.

I had some closer looks into the Debian image and found that you've been credited in the .xbindkeysrc file. So I guess you have some experience with the input challenges. Any thoughts on my mouse click emulation idea? Do you think it is reasonable or might it conflict with something else?
I'll try to get something working during the weekend and will post the results.

I've also noticed that there are some key combinations with shift+mod5. Do these actually work? I can't see any effect, but this might as well be due to my problems pushing two keys with one finger or the qwertz layout ouf my keyboard (which is a total mess in the terminal, I'm trying to get a qwerty keyboard).

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

Hi, I have questions.

I use the perlprimer under easydebian, and perlprimer window does not fit into the screen.
What can i do?

Thanks..

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

Yes they work!

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

Ok, thanks! I hope I'll get used to it (or I'll just change the shortcuts).

I just tried xdotool on my laptop but unfortunately this is no option because multiple mouse button clicks block each other. So simulating one by executing another doesn't work.
In the meantime I also found out about the built-in hold-for-right-click feature which is an almost perfect alternative combined with roxterms menu-based copy&paste.

That only leaves the lighter image question open.

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

You can simply de-install packages with apt-get to free some space in the image file and thus easily produce a minimalistic image yourself.

Re: easy debian: hide maemo top panel? and some other questions/suggestions
 

That's exactly what I did now. But since not everybody uses the same packages I think a more minimalistic approach would be reasonable for the future.

Don't get me wrong, Easy Debian is a great peace of software (actually it was an important reason for me to buy the N900) and having Openoffice, Gimp and Java in the image is a great tech demo, but I think it's a little overkill for everyday life with a Cortex A8 on a slow flash drive.

Basically this is what I changed so far:
- replaced openoffice with abiword and gnumeric (I doubt that I'll ever need them, but who knows. And they are much lighter than openoffice)
- removed gimp, java and epiphany-browser

installed:
- mc
- geeqie (great image viewer)
- mplayer (no idea so far how useful it can be but some -lavdopts options produce quite promising results in combination with -ov sdl)

mplayer-gui unfortunately doesn't work, the window contents aren't displayed. I suspect some problem in connection with xephyr.

I also noticed that one should be very careful when updating packages. Since lenny and squeeze are in the sources.list, one could easily and accidentally do a half done dist-upgrade by installing additional software. This is dangerous because upgrading libncurses5 (dependency of mplayer) breaks the Easy Debian image and the easy-deb-chroot package in maemo. But I guess this problem will be gone with the first image that is totally based on squeeze.