Recently I tried to updgrade my easyDebian from lenny to squeeze, but something went wrong, so I went for a clean install of squeeze. The remainder of this post describes what I did, and why I think GNUstep/wmaker isn't all that bad on a handheld.

Installing squeeze on n810

This is what I did

• I needed to run debootstrap, to get an initial debian system onto my card. To do this I used a cardreader and a desktop computer. Debootsrap has some dependencies which aren't easy to satisfy on maemo. Once this is done, the rest can be done on the device itself.
• I wrote a script, "debitz". which does a chroot into debian. For the script I shamelessly copied ideas from qole's easyDebian. The main difference is that I put everything into a single script and I decided to give the debian user a different home directory (/home/debitz)
• The drawback of this single-file idea is that debitz has to be visible both from debian and maemo under the same path. Putting it into /home/user is sufficient to fulfill this requirement.
  
• With debitz in place, I chrooted into the minimal debian installation and installed everything else using apt-get and aptitude. I did not go for heavyweights like openOffice, because I don't even use them on my desktop. I tried to record all the installations in debitz-debian, but since I only went through this process once I may have missed something.

A Desktop environment

At this point I was able to run debian commandline programs or X programs which are displayed on maemo's xserver. To be honest, I believe this is all you ever need, but just for the hell of it I decided to install a desktop environment.

Installing lxde is certainly not difficult. It is a bit more tricky to start a second xserver, but again qole had already solved this issue with the hostwin program, which creates a window into which the xephyr x-server will draw. The trickiest part was to get all the calls and callbacks into a single script.

Another difficulty was getting the keyboard right. I ended up fetching the .xkb file from a maemo session and installing it into a xephyr session. The nice thing is that all my xmodmap hacks are faithfully reflected in this single file. I added a function postInstall() in debitz which does this copying (and replaces KP_Enter by Return).

Once this was done I could launch lxde. I Changed some settings, made the fonts bigger, all nice an shiny, but a few things were bothering me:

• Lxde takes too long to start
• The window decorations were too small to use them with the stylus, let alone with the fingers.
• It was all too mainstream, too windows-like

So I googled around for the "most lightweight linux desktop" and was introduced to GNUstep with windowMaker as its window-manager. After two days plaing with it I am quite happy with it:

• Startup is about twice as fast than Lxde
• It looks "different" (it smells like Objective-C with a hint of smalltalk)
• You can easily operate it with the keyboard. Defining keyboard shortcuts is a breeze
• The docks and icons are big enough to be invoked with the finger
• You can get a "debian menu" easily. This is one benefit of running a desktop environment: you get a menu which follows SW instalations and deinstallations.
• Custom other menu entries can easily be created

Sceenshots

The main wmaker panel (wmprefs) with some stuff in the background and the dock to the right.



Switching windows can be done with the keyboard



The Menu can be invoked and naviagted by the keyboard. The debian menu is kept up-to-date by the system, the other entries were made by me.



You can create a hotkey (F6 of course) to launch

wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -n toggle,fullscreen

which saves you a lot of real eastate



What the scripts do

Debitz runs a debian command from maemo. It has three configurable variables at the top (the partition, the fs-type and the mountpoint of your debian installation). Change as neeed.

debitz -u cmd runs cmd as user
debitz -r cmd runs cmd as root
debitz -x runs a command in xephyr (debitz -x wmaker launches GNUstep, debitz -x lxsession launches lxde.)
debitz postInstall creates /home/user/debitz.xkb

debitz-debian records (most of) the installations I did on the debian side. You need to uncomment things you want installed.