HOLY SH*T!

Quote from Easy Debian wiki:
*facepalm* Ok, this was "oh sh*t!" moment, after trying to hammer this "bug" for few hours. No idea why it turned on, and I came across wiki mentioning it by pure accident (luck).

So, latest known bug was hammered, I'm creating image and uploading it...

BTW, sulu, do You know any way to enable clipboard sharing between Maemo and ED? It' really PITA, not being able to ctrl +c on ED and paste on Maemo, or the opposite.

/Estel

// Edit

After some practice, it becomes natural to bring panel without clicking icon, even if it's just under the cursor - matter of lifting stylus on the correct moment

Hi Estel, I'm not at home right now, but when you get your image ready (please localize for US and include any /home/user files) post it and I'll upload it to qole.org and add it to the installer. If it works for others, I'll put it at the top of the list.

I think it would be a great idea to start a new thread around Estel's image.

Thanks, qole! I localized it to US, packed image with lzma and uploaded, but (as I did it before reading Your post) I'm not sure about the (non-image inclusive) files from '/home/user/'. Only two relevant things that I've found are .chroot and .xbindkeysrc - both are highly modified to my liking (.chroot pointing out to dedicated ext4 partition and with temp size changed from 6MB to 30MB; .xbindkeysrc without TAB and ESC, as I've them binded via Maemo's RX-51). Should I add "vanilla" copies of these to image and repack it? Or have I missed something, and You're talking about other files?
---

Anyway, for adventurous ones, here it is:
http://lorienart.pl/cover/ed-squeeze-final.ext3.lzma

BIG FAT WARNING! Despite filename, it may not be "final" yet - minor things like (mentioned in this post) files from Maemo's /home/user/ may be missing. No big deal for advanced ED users, but everyone else - please wait for possible final "polishing" in line with qole's advices
---

qole, or sulu - if any of You recall out-of-image files, that I possibly missed, and/or test this image and find lacking things, I'll gladly fix it, re-pack and reupload image. Of course, if anyone is willing to fix it her/himself and repack/reupload instead of me, it's perfectly fine.

/Estel

I certainly can't keep up with all the wonderful developements on this thread. Special thanks to Estel, Maartenmk, and Sulu. Couple of questions:

1)In regards to dedicated partition: I just partitioned my mircoSD to have ext3,ext4 and the rest fat32 using a live gparted I happened to have discovered on a linux demo disc I had. First time I ever did anything like this so I was quite pleased until I read Estel's recommendation that it is better to make a dedicated partition on eMMC and create swap space on microSD. So could anyone comment on the improved performance, in a quantitative way, if one goes this route. For example, maartenmk got nearly a factor of two improvement when using dedicated partition on SDcard (see post 2324). Can I expect much better improvement having dedicated partition on eMMC. It would be nice to have similar benchmarks for eMMc case. Anyways, if I followed Estels suggestion, I'd have to do some major house cleaning so I'm reluctant at this point. But significant performance improvement will persuade me to try sooner rather than later...

2)In regards to how Estel's image is packaged with extra files and so forth, I would suggest that all this be done such that it as consistent with current form of Easy Debian. It might help to merge some of Estels changes in chroot and .xbindkeysrc but perhaps, if possible, keep them as comments that ppl can incorporate as desired. For example not everyone will have ext4 (either on eMMC or microSD). Anyways, just a suggestion, Perhaps doing things this way is taking too many steps backwards... Maybe what I need is Easy Estel!

3)Getting back to partitions, When using the Synaptic Pkg Mg, that came with Easy Debian, I happen to notice, in the Debian repositories, the presence of gparted! Has anyone actutally tried this on the N900? I downloaded it and noticed that it needs a superuser password to use but that is circumvented by using the sudo command. It would be interesting if, using ED on microSD that you could treat it as a live gparted to repartition the N900 or if ED is on eMMC that you could repartition a microSD. I will certainly give the latter a try tonight.

I have successfully installed Gparted, working fine on a standard ED image after enabling squeeze repo and forcing update using apt-get, also installed dosfstools to enable fat/fat32. Added a link to the Maemo menu to call it directly.

Mscion, while my measurements were accurate, I believe I did not have swap on SD yet. If you do, your ED running from an image on eMMC could well be already faster than what I started with, and therefore you may not see as big a difference.
After switching my swap to SD I have not done any new benchmarks, but I am almost sure ED became slower, for the reason Estel explained.
Moving ED to eMMC should solve that, so I am guessing you will see similar or slightly better performance to what I had when doing the measurements.
I just reflashed, and I don't have ED re-installed yet (I was waiting for news on Estel's image), so I can't check atm.
But I do intend to install it again, and since these measurements are pretty much the only useful thing I have to contribute, I will try to do some new ones.

I can confirm it works! Repartioning my microSD was real easy using the debian Gparted on N900. I remember being so impressed that I could compile and run c and fortran codes using Easy Debian on N900. Now this! Awesome!

Question:

If you use easy Debian from the microSD can you then run Gparted to repartion eMMC? My guess is that it is much more complicated than I think but could someone chime in and explain why... Thanks!

Why not?

# gparted /dev/mmcblk0

(assuming that your /dev/* is copied/bind-mounted on ED).

Thanks very much to you all :-)

While moving from ED-on-SD to swap-on-sd:ED-on-EMMC, as a rule of thumb, I would not expect *as much* improvement in performance, as with moving from image file to dedicated partition. Yet, if You're still using swap on eMMC, by moving it to microSD You're going to feel overall increase in performance for *whole* device, so it's definitely worth the effort. Especially, if You'll also add to this customization of few swap related settings.

In Your situation, as a quick&dirty improvement, I would just "cut" 768 MB from microSd fat32, and create swap there (so, use both Ed and swap on microSD). When time permits, and You'll be able to "clean" some thing on eMMC, You can always "kick" Your dedicated partition into eMMC.

Thanks, but it wouldn't be possible without sulu messing with dist-upgrade and it complications (I could not fix pulseaudio etc issues in thousand of years...) and of course, qole bringing us ED and easy chroot as whole, on first place.

Anyway, no worries. Image that I've uploaded is (well, at least *should*) be independent of any "personal" tweaks in .chroot and .xbindkeysrc. Also, image was mkfs'ed as ext3, so it can be used by people without kernel-power as well, while still regaining possibility to mount is as ext4 - yet, keep in mind, that some 'special' ext4 benefits aren't available when doing so, see wikipedia article about ext filesystem. I concluded, that people using ext4 will be (most likely) sitting on dedicated partition anyway, so they can copy content of image file to any filesystem they feel fancy.

Nice catch. Well, I'm pretty sure that it wont work if You want to repartition Ed partition from it but I'm sure You know it already. I would also not risk repartitioning that include /home + opt (/dev/mmcblk0p2) - remember, we're still in chroot, so AIUI, it would be almost like repartitioning ED from within ED.

On the other hand, I don't see much reason, why we shouldn't be able to cut&slize /dev/mmcblk0p1 (MyDocs), or MicroSD as a whole. Just be sure, that it doesn't involve moving/resizing mentioned /home/ + opt. Also, be sure to disable swap on microSD, before messing with SD.

Repartitioning with GUI independant from other device would be great, but for full solution, we would need some thing like u-boot loading kernel from microSD + ArchLinux from microSD. Doable, yet I think no one tried this up to date.

/Estel

// Edit

As You all have probably noticed, the file I uploaded is image packed as .lzma - just like any other ED image files. You need to unpack it first (can be done via tar -xf --lzma <file>) - warning, on device, it's prone to same things, that haunted images provided by qole, i.e. device can get unresponsive during unpacking. In my case - using swap on microSD and tweaked settings, there is no such problem - it unpacks gracefully, and device is 100% responsive during unpacking (yet, unpacking takes 100% of CPU, so other programs aren't blazing fast), but in other setup's it may be better to first unpack it on other machine. AFAIK, it's safe to do so under any OS - may be even windoze + 7zip (unpacked image file won't suffer due to windows filesystems not handling permissions - for the same reasons, image file can be held on MyDocs).

While unpacking on device - no matter of setup - it may be good to do it with nice command, so (for example) 'nice 19 tar -xf --lzma ed-squeeze-final.ext3.lzma' - of course, if You already cd'ed to directory, where You want to see unpacked image.
---

After un-lzma'ing, image can be used directly with ED (just remember, to change 'ext2' to 'ext3' in /home/user/.chroot). It's content can be also moved to dedicated partition - to do so, just trivially mount image somewhere ('mount -o loop <imagefile> <mounpoint>), and 'cp -a' it's content to desired place (dedicated partition). Then, modify /home/user/.chroot, to make it point to Your dedicated partition, instead of image file.
---

When qole will review my questions about files from /home/user/, and image will be confirmed to working fine for few brave folks testing it, I'll land on ED installation, as "first" choice. I've also prepared .desktop files for Maemo (to easy launch LibreOffice or Chromium), so maybe I'll be also time for small update of package - if not, .desktop files can be also downloaded separately.