Notices

Thanks Angel!

Niles

No, but Shoutcast.com works just fine.

how 'bout that cfdisk?

got some tips or do they just come from yo' sista?

Yes, I spotted another post someplace suggesting it; works really well; no problems with the browser hanging or the player not launching. Need to edit the names of streams saved to favorites but not that big of an issue. I was trying Live365 and it was frsutrating - it insists on opening another browser window and I was having about a 50% success rate getting the stream to load and play. In contrast, shoutcast is 100%. Recommended.

And my 1GB Sandisk rs-mmc from Buy.com arrived today. Going to split it into swap, a vfat partition for moving data and files over usb, and a big ext2fs partition for everything else.

Do you have any worries about the lifespan of your flash memory once you have designated a partition to withstand the relatively high write activity of swapping?

On my 770:

FBReader
very pleased even after being spoiled by µbook... look forward to further development

xterm
requirement... period

nethack
nice port! gotta set up some easy save file copy/restre scripts

lxdoom
goodness... if this can run so fast on the 770, I don't see why we couldn't expect vast improvements in speed/efficiency in other apps and the OS.

In fact, I look forward to something alternative for the 770 along the lines of a somewhat stripped-down, or altogether different GUI system. I am impressed with maemo, but it sure feels like,it is asking a lot of the device when I feel that the device should be capable of running smoothly within the constaints of this hardware.

If a 200mhz/64M ram machine can run win95 then we should be able to do a little more with what we have.. jmho, and another thread realy.

How about Windows Media 9 streaming audio?

Oops, sorry I missed this. Yeah, my tip is to build it from the source ;-)

Ok, sorry - I forgot where I got the source from. I want to say it was http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/cfdisk-utf8.html but I'm not sure (the package I linked to is a UTF8 version of the disk utilities).

As I said, finding the source package to build was the hardest part. If you can trust someone like me, feel free to PM me and I'll send you the compiled binaries for fdisk, cfdisk, mkswap, and mke2fs. If you don't, google is your friend ;-)

Well, if I had one I'm sure she'd... well... let's not go there ;-)

Brad.

ks1g: okay lemme see if I've got this straight. The swap is for memory limits until they fix the OS, the vfat is for windows connectivity, and the ext2fs is another place for your installs. Did I get anything wrong?

by the way, is their a good short list anywhere of must know commands for xterm? ty.

Oh man... my 512MB Sandisk came from Buy.com too (the 1GB wasn't in stock :-().

I gave up on VFAT because I'm sure I'd forget to turn swap off before I plugged it into a Windows machine (and my luck it'd crash too).

But swap and ext2fs is a good idea - I setup 2 24MB swap partitions (I'm saving an extra 24MB in case I 'fry' the first 24 swapping - I guess I'm being 'half-empty' here) and the rest as ext2fs.

If you've got wireless access, Winscp (or scp from a *nix box) is almost as easy as using VFAT.

Brad.

That's the basic idea. I've been playing a bit more with it, and here's what I am using so far on my 1GByte Sandisk RS-MMC card:

1st partition: large FAT (I think it's type "6" in the Linux fdisk program) partition. I used the identical partition type the 770 software sets up if you format the MMC card using the stock software from Nokia. I selected the 1st partition because the 770 defaults to mounting this partition as the memory card (probably an entry in /etc/fstab that I need to check). I decided to leave the "stock" config alone as much as I could. I noticed that the partition is flagged as bootable, so I left it that way.

I also created a 16MByte swap file on this section.

2nd partition: Dedicated swap, 64 MBytes. Activated manually (run swapon as root in the 770).

3rd partition: ext3fs (journaling file system; more forgiving of sudden unmounts if I pop the MMC card or plug in USB!). I am assuming the 770 kernel has ext3fs support. If it doesn't, no biggie - the kernel should mount it as an ext2fs partition. I currently mount this manually. So far, I haven't tried using it for very much.

After I do some more playing around, I will edit /etc/fstab and/or create some shell scripts to allow me to mount and unmount swap files, swap partitions, and make better use of this storage.

To create these partitions, I connected the 770 via USB cable to a Ubutnu Linux desktop system. The Linux system automatically mounted the partition(s) on the MMC card, so I had to unmount them first. I then (as root on my desktop) used "fdisk -l /dev/sda" to see what partitions were on the MMC and "fdisk /dev/sda" to change them. (My system mounts USB devices as if they were SCSI devices; your mount points may vary). You could also edit partitions by removing the MMC card from the 770 and using a card reader, or install fdisk on the 770 and run it locally.

Once the partitions are created, you need to format them using mkfs.vfat for the FAT partition, mkswap for the swap partition, and mke3fs or mke2fs for the Linux partition. You use the "swapon" and "swapoff" commands (as root) on the 770 to make swapfiles or swap partitions active.

What you really want are the built-in commands for the busybox shell the xterm makes available, or for the bash shell if you use that. And tips and tricks on customizing your environment to load $PATH, library file paths, and provide command shortcuts (like launch an ssh session to a system you access regularly). The situation will get better as more people figure out and document what works well. In the meantime, there are numerous books and web sites on beginner shell commands that should get you started. Busybox appears to use a subset of commands used by the bash shell, so the many tutorials on bash should be of some use.

I've been using my desktop linux system to edit the various files (easier to have a large display, keyboard, and keep open windows to various web sites that way). I then copy the files to the 770 (via USB, could also use scp or place onto a web server and download) and install them where needed. I could do it all on the 770, but I find it easier this way.