This is really a shame. For me, Easy Debian has many features you find in a typical linux environment that maemo, via xterm, does not have (at least as far as I know...). For example, I wanted to look at a jpeg file and did not know how to display it using xterm so I just used the "debbie-sue" command and then used "display file.jpeg" to see the file. Anyways, I hope this problem is fixed so that Easy Debian continues to improve. It is a wonderful work.

sudo su
passwd

you can also change the maemo root password like that.. but just remember if you are connected directly to the internet you are open to being attacked

We're still experimenting over in this thread.

It seems the best thing to do to speed up heavy I/O, and avoid reboots during decompression, is to put your Debian image on a SD card. The next best thing is to put your swap on an SD card.

The simplest thing that seems to work for me is to make a little script, call it swaponoff or something, with two lines:

chmod +x swaponoff
sudo ./swaponoff
(then do the thing you were about to do)

I'll add this to the installer (just before the decompression) and upload it as a new version.

Easy Debian 0.9.55 now has a new script that "resets" the swap, which seems to fix the hour-to-decompress problem on the image installer. So the image should decompress reasonably quickly now.

Please test the script for other problematic situations, such as installing large apps in the chroot using apt-get.

Try installing apps that would crash the system when installing before, but this time, close all of your open apps (except the chroot terminal of course) and browser windows just before starting the install, open a Maemo terminal and run:
Please report your results!

I discovered that my hack only works when Swappolube is installed and enabled. You'll need to have it installed, too, until I figure out Swappolube's magic setting(s).

Ok version 0.9.56 adds a second script, nr_requests_setup, that seems to fix the decompression problem even when Swappolube is disabled.

So now you have to run two commands the first time (after a reboot):
After that, each time you are about to do something "big", just issue the "sudo swapoffon" command.

It's working great for me

swapoff /dev/mmcblk0p3 rebooted my N900 and removed my desktop widgets - but their position was saved so it was easy to restore them. Apparently this happens when the process hildon-home is stopped.

Also I think this may be more of an I/O problem to the MyDocs partition, as sometimes when I have been backing up the ED image the windows copy dialog reports 45 minutes remaining. If I restart the device and try again it only takes 5 minutes. It feels the same as when I am unable to connect to PC as the device storage is in use, even though I am not doing anything. I tried lsof to see if anything else is accessing the MyDocs partition but it reports nothing. Any other ways?

Also Is it safe to unmount MyDocs and perform fsck when the N900 is running? Windows chkdsk doesn't do anything, maybe the copying out the fsck from ED will work better.

Oh well I am giving up for a bit as I have uni exams coming up. My ED image still boots and it now runs all the programs I need, though any intensive disk activity causes the whole N900 to reboot. Spent about 6 hours trying to resize my ED image to 1GB but even running cp for 10 minutes causes it to die (can't use resize2fs as the image has errors from each reboot and running e2fsck just makes it unbootable).

I guess I need to partition my SD card and maybe MyDocs as well so they can use ext2 as FAT sux. Something to do over summer after I make a linux PC..

Hi zero,

To me, this sounds as if you have more problems than just Easy Debian. Perhaps you have a third-party desktop widget that is misbehaving?

I've found that I can fsck the MyDocs partition without even unmounting it, unlike ext2 partitions.