That's not FireFox; that's IceWeasel... Sheesh!

wow iceweasel 3 is pretty sweet. i'm booting into debian and after the initial slow startup this provides a very pleasant browsing experience. All the sites which I tried work well and load very quickly including google docs.

Those *sicilianazzi* from simplemachines.it is remind us that is possible to propagate a debian system with debootstrap - in the last few minutes I made an arm lenny minbase system which is only 96.9 megabytes and includes apt - then I'll populate it with openoffice.org only. Let's see how big it gets.

Mr. Bernardis, I think you (and those other guys on your active-volcano island*) might be on to something there. A minimal Debian system built with debootstrap might be just the thing for our chroot, rather than working with the necessarily-larger bootable Debian. And it might just be the best thing for a .deb install. I would suggest sid over lenny, however. The package versions seem consistently newer in sid.

* I love volcanoes. I went to visit Etna in 1992 to watch the lava crawling down the hillside.

Qolling again?

I don't understand what you mean. Maybe I'm being ignorant, but that's not qolling.

I'm serious. Compare the package versions for OpenOffice.org. And I just chose that one because we've been talking about it.

Lenny: 1:2.4.0-5 (no package for armel)
Sid: 1:2.4.0-6

EDIT: I've decided qolling actually does require a healthy dose of ignorance on the part of the qoller.

EDIT2: OK, this is all obvious after reading Debian's releases page. Sid packages, by definition, will always be higher numbers, since Lenny is going to be the next stable release and the packages are all in the queue for that goal, and Sid is under active development.

I was joking; the thing is, I thought that newer packages in sid was completely obvious; lenny's currently testing (not released as stable yet, but not unstable), sid's unstable... Etch, the current stable release, doesn't exist for armel, and is thus out of the question.

News from the same category as OpenOffice.org:

Evolution runs, it just doesn't run very well (kinda slow and layout is poor for tablet). But if you need that precious MS Exchange (or Novell Groupware) compatibility, then you might put up with the headaches.

UPDATE: Please see this post for a larger (42MB) tarball that works much better for installing things like OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Firefox / Iceweasel.

I did four different debootstrap variants (lenny, sid, minbase lenny, minbase sid), and the minbase sid was the smallest. I tarred up each of my variants, and I've uploaded the tiny minbase sid one for you-all. It is just over 28mb.

You download the tarball, make a directory (like /debian) in your big SD clone partition, and then
to set up the chroot.

Use the chroot script from the wiki to "get into" the chroot, and then you'll have to
to start installing stuff.

As for installing OpenOffice.org, I found I couldn't just install the big meta-package, it gave errors about dependencies not being installed. So I had to work my way back to the openoffice.org-core package. It gave me a full page of package names to be installed, and told me that it would use 250MB on the disk!

EDIT: OK, this is weird. I installed the openoffice.org-core package. It claims to be the 1:2.4.0-6 package. When I try to install anything "above" that, however, (e.g. openoffice.org-writer) it says that it needs openoffice.org-core = 1:2.4.0-6, which is not going to be installed.

EDIT2: After downloading the package and doing a I found out that somebody's recently screwed up the openoffice.org package. The high-level packages are "conflicting" with openoffice-common. Looks like they've got a broken version number in there (1:2.4.1), from one of the Intel architectures, probably. Sigh. I got it installed, but it sure is ugly. I hope they get this fixed soon.

EDIT3: OK this is just wacky. There's something wrong with the versioning in this chroot in the ooo packages.

Just over 28 MB (bzipped), eh?

Wonder if it fits in flash memory (jffs2, so some compression, but it won't be as good as bz2), for chroot... probably not that hot, really; it'd be better, if you're trying for something useful in flash, to strip down JohnX's build and obliterate ITOS. But it'd be cool, anyway. I might try this on my internal memory.