So, I'm starting to run out of neat ideas for Deblet excepting installer/system work, so I'd like to know what you people would like to see in Deblet to make the system great for Tablet usage

My own wishlist/"TODO":
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Swap (file and partition) in installer

A2DP support (I have a SE headset my ears are itching to use again)

Dash instead of Bash as /bin/sh - makes it faster

Fixing tablet_user to be uid/gid 29999 to match with Maemo user

Brightness applets (some desktop env's have rotation, like KDE)

Experimental Flash User interfaces for use and showoff (we have Flash in GTKMOZEMBED, we can run backend web server that does the magic..)

Including automatic Debian chroot scripts for file/partition in Maemo using Installer so Deblet applications can be run easily through Maemo. Maybe even a dedicated Deblet menu that picks the stuff in Debian menu systems..

So, what wishes do you fantastic Deblet users have and any that you might want to work on yourself?

I haven't yet actually made my n810 boot debian, so I'm not sure what'll jump out at me once it does ... hopefully this install attempt will be the successful one

Swap configuration in the installer would be a nice touch, especially for people with limited *nix experience.

It might be nice to have a couple more window managers available as metapackages. IceWM is a fairly logical choice since it's so light; perhaps fluxbox would be a good alternative (provided we remap lclick to open the root menu, easily done in ~/.fluxbox/keys). I used IceWM several years ago on an Ipaq that ran debian, it worked quite well with considerably fewer resources than we have on the NITs. Again, I haven't actually been able to play with the xfce setup yet, but lighter is almost always better on a device like this.

cfisk still doesn't seem to want to work for me- not sure if it just doesn't like my sd card or if it's a problem with the installer. Not a big deal if you can partition on another machine, but it'd be nice if it worked.

It'd be _really_ nice to have the option to 'r to retry' in addition to 'enter to close window' throughout the installer. Getting all the way to 'apt-get install nit-env-stskeeps' and having to start over because some package didn't build correctly is ...well, not a real happy thing

Perhaps another useful thing would be an option to build and test the local repository before starting the installation, to make sure all of the packages did build properly.

Qole - You wanna send me the config file changes and stuff you did to IceWM??? I could build an IceWM metapackage that will pull in IceWM.. and make Easy Debian changes... so users will never know the difference between Deblet IceWM and Easy Debian.

Here's a crummy drawing i did in my tablet's drawing application of a "semi-graphical" deblet installer that would display a progress bar, terminal window (for seeing what's accuring), a options window that displays the options that you've selected and would display a estimation how much memory you currently have left in your deblet partition and how much it will take up after the install, also It would display technical information about swap, upload/download rate, time estimation, etc..

Stskeeps- Btw, have you ben able to get those packages that i provided you set up (nit-env-gnome-full and gdm-autologin)?, just wondering.

Yeah, tablet-gdm-autologin has been checked in. GNOME will come sometime during today. The problem about your idea (with the very nice drawing I couldn't do better :P) however is that screen estate is not that big - we actually need the screen estate for stuff like cfdisk and silly debconf stuff (keymap yadda yadda). Also it's bloody hard to estimate how far in the process you actually are :P

Anyone want to find out how the heck we could start to use debconf-gtk even if we're setting up stuff with apt-get?

If there is a way to temporarly hack/modifi debconf so instead of needing a large terminal window for deb configuration, The installer could open a dilog box instead for easy configuration of the package (keymaps, ect....) or for running a small program such as cfdisk or parted, so we would not need the terminal window to take up the whole screen.

(witch might be able to be done using zenity containing a separate terminal window, for running a program such as cfdisk or parted... or checkboxes, for chosing keymaps.)

Yeah, I'm looking into debconf-gtk but I'm not sure how it would work 100% yet.
Could someone try to export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk and try to install something using debconf?

And maybe dpkg -l cdebconf?

From next installer version:



Downside of this: you have to install libgnome2-perl in Deblet which drags in a lot of stuff :P
Upside: Stuff like root password and user info/password gets put in dialog boxes.

EDIT: I've added debconf support to tablet-user package, and a choice to use GTK or Dialog in the installer. GTK is only usable with a keyboard since on screen keyboard sadly doesn't work in chroot.. I've also made root password setting be done with zenity.

A challenge to someone who's up for it.

In a Deblet installation, there's /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg. These contain .desktop files which are very similar to Maemo's /usr/share/applications/hildon.

I have compiled a maemo-select-menu-location (that should be maemo-add-app really..), http://bsd.tspre.org/~stskeeps/maemo-add-app.launch, which doesn't ask for folder location but just adds it (chmod +x it)

It is possible to execute this using 'maemo-invoke /path/maemo-add-app.launch <.desktop file that is in /usr/share/applications/hildon>'

So, what is the challenge: Make a script that adds "relevant" (based on categories?) .desktop file, alters them to use the Easy Debian/chroot scripts for running and hence adds them to Extras so it works. It should be repeatable so it will remove all added-by-itself items first, then add debian .desktop files again.

Goal is to have for Easy Debian/Deblet that we don't have to set up static .desktop files, and the menu can be refreshed to reflect current applications installed in Deblet.

Is this a Debian-specific thing, or a Deblet thing? That is, will any Debian fs have this folder?

So, what is the command for running this program? Specifically, for adding <application-X> to <menu-Y> (creating menu-Y if required)?

I wish the Maemo menu had nested menus. Then we could just dump everything into a "Deblet" menu tree. As it is, the Deblet menu will be huge... (I don't think it should just drop them into "Extras", but into "Deblet")

That is a very cool goal. I'm on board!