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Kabouik	2011-07-06 , 23:43
Posts: 1,336 \| Thanked: 3,932 times \| Joined on Jul 2010 @ Brittany, France	#2331

I'm trying to do what you suggest Estel, i.e., installing EasyDebian on a dedicated eMMC partition (ext4) and swap on SD card. However, I have absolutely no idea of how making EasyDebian to use the swap partition on the SD card. Is there a conf file I should edit to point to the /dev/mmcblk1pX corresponding to swap?

Thanks in advance.

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mscion	2011-07-07 , 15:03
Posts: 1,873 \| Thanked: 4,529 times \| Joined on Mar 2010 @ North Potomac MD	#2332

Originally Posted by maartenmk

@Estel
It's a class 2 8GB card that came with an Xperia X10. I am not quite ready to start repartitioning the eMMC, and I'm also hesitant to put swap on microSD, but I do have a class 4 4GB card, maybe I'll try using that.

@mscion and debernardis:
I repeated the exact same test for starting from a partition from within Maemo, and then a few more times without rebooting. I did not use Close Debian.
1st: 1:20min (loading OO took 35secs)
2nd: 1:05min (loading OO took 15secs)
3rd: 1:10min
4th: 1:05min
Then I did the same once more (without rebooting), O/Ced too 1150MHz, this took 55 sec.

mscion, for the original test I did record the time it took to start OO. With the image file on MyDocs, from within Maemo, it was 55secs.

But after a few days of use I must say that the responsiveness improvement is just as nice as, or even nicer than the loading time improvement. ED is now really usable, the lag is pretty much gone.
So using a dedicated partition is highly recommended.

Amazing what a difference a microSD card makes! Using the image I have on the mircoSD, starting from fresh boot, and from Maemo I fired up OO and it now took about 45-50 seconds to reach the point where I can type (the cursor flashes). On second and third try it took about 35-40 seconds. This is quite an improvement from having the image in MyDocs.There it took about 1:35 1st try and 45-50 seconds 2nd and 3rd trys.

I tried the same with the recommended settings on Swappolube but I could not see any improvement. If anyone can suggest alternative settings that could help I will try them.

While my benchmarks are not quite as good as maarenmks, a source of my increased time may be that I have the math editor and other addtions to OO from the debian repositories that do not come with the default easy debian version and increase the time it takes to load up. Probably adding 10 or more seconds from past experience. This could easlily explain most of the timing difference.

@maartenmk Is this the case or does you OO version have equation editors and such from the repositories? If it is the latter than the performance improvements from your modifications are certainly worth exploring further.

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maartenmk	2011-07-07 , 17:24
Posts: 182 \| Thanked: 69 times \| Joined on Nov 2009 @ Netherlands	#2333

I did not modify or add anything to OO. It may be a newer version due to the updated image, it's 3.2.1.

I did activate the icons to start OOcalc and Writer directly now, that shaves another few seconds off.

As for swappolube, I may have used some of the settings qole recommended in the i/o improvement thread.

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Kabouik	2011-07-08 , 14:36
Posts: 1,336 \| Thanked: 3,932 times \| Joined on Jul 2010 @ Brittany, France	#2334

I don't understand how you guys have succeeded in installing Easydebian in a dedicated partition. I did everything that is mentionned here, but I'm stuck at the "tar cf - . | tar xfp - -C /mnt/n900sd". The first tries I did resulted in the phone rebooting after a few minutes. Then, I reflashed it for another reason, retried, and now it does not reboot but still nothing happens. I entered "tar cf - . | tar xfp - -C /mnt/n900sd" yesterday evening and the phone was still processing this morning. It was not frozen, I had still 100% control this morning. I just aborted the command and closed the terminal because, obviously, it was not working as intended.

Maybe I did something wrong, I don't know. I admit I don't really understand why we have to create two new directories in /mnt/ in the howto. Why wouldn't we just cd to /home/user/MyDocs (path to .ext2 file for me), mount /dev/mmcblk1p2 into /mnt/n900sd, and then run the tar command?

Just to be clear: I did exactly what is written. However, I don't understand the purpose of one of the steps, so maybe I missed something important.

P.S.
I also tried to only put the ext2 file into /dev/mmcblk1p2 using my Linux computer, then editing /home/user/.chroot to specify that the image file is in there, and then running Chroot or LXDE from Maemo shortcuts, but I get an error message "Mounting failure".

Last edited by Kabouik; 2011-07-08 at 14:40.

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	Estel	2011-07-08 , 18:08
	Posts: 5,028 \| Thanked: 8,613 times \| Joined on Mar 2011	#2335

Originally Posted by Kabouik

I'm trying to do what you suggest Estel, i.e., installing EasyDebian on a dedicated eMMC partition (ext4) and swap on SD card. However, I have absolutely no idea of how making EasyDebian to use the swap partition on the SD card. Is there a conf file I should edit to point to the /dev/mmcblk1pX corresponding to swap?

Thanks in advance.

AFAIK, ED as a chroot use exactly same swap as maemo, so if maemo use swap on microSD, You're good to go.

@mscion
We're not talking about putting ED image on microSD, instead of MyDocs. That's almost useless performance-wise (i can provide little boost, if Your swap is on eMMC, due to less I,/O conflicts with ED request). We're talkng about using dedicated ED partition, with "real" ED filesystem, instead of image. Using that is HUGE improvement. Amazing, how strong placebo effect can be

@Kabouik

Yea, getting info, how to do it correct way is PITA, due to lack of info in ED wiki. I was able to find parts of instruction in few different threads, and cook usable solution. Ho ever, I don't remember everything now, so it's best to wait for qole response.

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Last edited by Estel; 2011-07-08 at 18:12.

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	qole	2011-07-08 , 20:13
	Moderator \| Posts: 7,109 \| Thanked: 8,820 times \| Joined on Oct 2007 @ Vancouver, BC, Canada	#2336

There have been several posts / threads about how to put the files from the image file into a partition. Here's one I posted a while ago. We should put this in the wiki I guess. It needs modernizing, too.

In other news, I'm eager to see what new roadblocks have been thrown in the way of Easy Debian on the Harmattan (N9/950) devices...

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mscion	2011-07-08 , 20:46
Posts: 1,873 \| Thanked: 4,529 times \| Joined on Mar 2010 @ North Potomac MD	#2337

Originally Posted by Estel

@mscion
We're not talking about putting ED image on microSD, instead of MyDocs. That's almost useless performance-wise (i can provide little boost, if Your swap is on eMMC, due to less I,/O conflicts with ED request). We're talkng about using dedicated ED partition, with "real" ED filesystem, instead of image. Using that is HUGE improvement. Amazing, how strong placebo effect can be

Thanks for the clarification. Although I would disagree that the results I quote are a a placebo effect. Running easy debian from my microSD is definately better then from MyDocs. I did find this to be counter intuitive as I expected the opposite and so found this interesting. But I do not know the internal working of N900 so to someone familiar with such they might not be surprised. Anyways, I do look forward to the HUGE improvements when I set up dedicated ED partition!

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mscion	2011-07-08 , 22:06
Posts: 1,873 \| Thanked: 4,529 times \| Joined on Mar 2010 @ North Potomac MD	#2338

Originally Posted by qole

There have been several posts / threads about how to put the files from the image file into a partition. Here's one I posted a while ago. We should put this in the wiki I guess. It needs modernizing, too.

In other news, I'm eager to see what new roadblocks have been thrown in the way of Easy Debian on the Harmattan (N9/950) devices...

Hi qole.
Would you clarify what you mean by modernizing? Should I just follow the same instructions or are there some modifications that would be useful to know.

Also, are there codes (like OO or wxmaxima) that are currently in the Debian repositories and compiled so that they would run on the N9? I looked but no luck. Perhaps I wasn't checking in the right place.

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	Estel	2011-07-09 , 00:08
	Posts: 5,028 \| Thanked: 8,613 times \| Joined on Mar 2011	#2339

I suppose, that qole means modernizing, wiki page, not particularly instruction about putting ED into dedicated partition.

By the way, i remember now - qole's updated instruction (2 posts, not only first one

) was what I used to create my partition, with modification to filesystem used (I was using ext3 at the time). Now, I'm using ext4 with satisfying results, so unless qole disagree for whatever reasons, I encourage kernel-power users to extract ED image into ext4. Of course, also modify corresponding lines in config files - replace ext2 or ext with ext4.

By the way, for performance hungry people, I suggest migrating from ext3 to ext4 for maemo /home - it boost speed for all maemo, and due to ED being chroot, it's also affected a little, due to maemo counterparts and symbiotic things running better/faster.

Last edited by Estel; 2011-07-09 at 00:10.

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Kabouik	2011-07-09 , 00:15
Posts: 1,336 \| Thanked: 3,932 times \| Joined on Jul 2010 @ Brittany, France	#2340

Originally Posted by Estel

I suppose, that qole means modernizing, wiki page, not particularly instruction about putting ED into dedicated partition.

By the way, i remember now - qole's updated instruction (2 posts, not only first one ) was what I used to create my partition, with modification to filesystem used (I was using ext3 at the time). Now, I'm using ext4 with satisfying results, so unless qole disagree for whatever reasons, I encourage kernel-power users to extract ED image into ext4. Of course, also modify corresponding lines in config files - replace ext2 or ext with ext4.

By the way, for performance hungry people, I suggest migrating from ext3 to ext4 for maemo /home - it boost speed for all maemo, and due to ED being chroot, it's also affected a little, due to maemo counterparts and symbiotic things running better/faster.

I tried it, and also tried converting my /home into ext4... Five minutes later I had to reflash my N900.

I do use the kernel-power, but I guess I did something wrong when converting my /home to ext4 (I did that with gParted, using command lines that should not erase the data). Anyway, I'll stick to ext3 for the moment and maybe try again ext4 later.

Thanks qole for instructions. I'll try that tonight or tomorrow. It looks quite similar to what I did using the thread I linked before, hope it will end better.