Ok, so I had an insomnia episode and you're getting a nice present.

Here is the Debian image file.

debian-chroot-apps-img.tar.bz2
[FileFactory.com]
[Pipeline's Mirror]

It is ~230 MB compressed, and 1GB uncompressed. It includes OpenOffice, AbiWord, Firefox 3 (Iceweasel) with Java applet capability, and Synaptic (for adding more fun stuff). To extract it, you need the same tar command (gnutar, found at elkins.org repo) that is used by several other projects here, including PenguinBait's KDE. You must drop the extracted image file (debian.img.ext2) in the root of (one of) your SD card(s). Assuming you have an N810 and you are putting it on your internal SD card, /media/mmc2, and you are at a command line in the place where you downloaded the tar file:

Alternately, you can install bzip2 (found in the extras repository, red pill for app manager) and do this:

If someone wants to host a mirror of the file on a better file host, please do. The free service that I'm using is slow and yucky! (FileFactory actually seems OK)

I have made an installable package that sets up root access, puts tested, working scripts in the right places, makes menu items for the Debian apps that people want (open office, abiword, and firefox 3). There are two versions, one for each of the two possible SD card positions.

Please find attached two .deb files. Choose the .deb that corresponds to the SD card where you put your debian.img.ext2 file. (mmc2 is the N810 internal card).

If I get some success stories, I'll start a new thread and make a big announcement that we're up and running with easy Debian chroot. I'll include more detailed instructions about untarring the image, including where to get the right tar version. Maybe I can even include it in the .deb and extract the file as part of the install? Any other ideas to make this easier?


Some notes / warnings:

• This deb messes with very little in OS2008. After install, your tablet should remain much the way it was before. Please note, however, that, in order to run properly on the tablet, running Debian apps have access to a lot of stuff, and they can possibly do damage. This chroot isn't much of a "jail", on purpose. Sometimes, installing or updating an app will shut down or restart an important service on the tablet as part of the install. This can have some very interesting effects, sometimes causing the tablet to freeze or reboot. You can mount the image and chroot without the script if you need a better "jail" that doesn't have as much access to running servers.
• Everything starts up really slowly, especially Iceweasel (since it has no splash screen). The tablet seems to be sitting there, doing nothing, sometimes for a long time. If you want to test your new chroot without using the command line, start with something smaller, like AbiWord or Synaptic or pop up the matchbox-keyboard.
• The matchbox-keyboard menu item causes the matchbox keyboard (father to our tablet stylus keyboard) to pop up, or if it is up, the menu item makes it go away. There's no "hide" button on the matchbox-keyboard, so you have to use the menu item to hide it.
• To run an application as user from the command line, type "sudo debian hilda <command>". If you need to run the app as root, drop the "hilda" from the command.
• OpenOffice is completely Tablet unfriendly. There's no icon on the left-hand app panel. If you lose your OpenOffice screen, or you need it fullscreen, use the included "Make OpenOffice Fullscreen" (in the Extras menu). I would have made one for AbiWord too, since the AbiWord fullscreen hides all the menu bars, but AbiWord sets the window title to your document name so I have no idea what window to fullscreen.
• I install the movable-windows hack for OS2008. You really need it for running Debian programs in OS2008. If you hate that, uninstall my .deb, or copy /etc/osso-af-init/matchbox.defs.orig back to matchbox.defs and everything will be the way it was before.
• In an attempt to make the image file as tiny as possible, I purged all locales except en-US, en-CA and en-GB. I also deleted all of the doc files and the man files too. This has definitely broken internationalization, and it has probably broken other things too (ie the cups printing system). Please try stuff out and report back. I have made a nice clean Debian root file system available as an image, and you can set your locale and proceed to install everything you want, just the way you want it.
• Previous posts have made it clear that there's some broken packages associated with OpenOffice. I hacked the Debian chroot's dpkg status file so it wouldn't complain, but don't upgrade the OpenOffice packages until you read here that the packages have been fixed, or you could be left with a broken install and now the Debian team has fixed the packages so they should update and be fine now.

Have fun!