Thanks a lot! I'm downloading the Gnome packages, trying to make it work once again.

Note: my Debian partition is on /media/mmc1 (only 1 partition: 100% of the external card). Why is that odd?

It is odd because Maemo auto-mounts it, and then it gets mounted into the chroot, and so there's this weird, infinite-mirror thing going on, where /media/mmc1/media/mmc1/media/mmc1/....etc is a valid directory. A crawler like maemo's metalayer-crawler would wander off into the infinite distance trying to index everything over and over again, slowing down your system...

I strongly suggest using qtparted to shrink your partition "to the right" and add a small partition at the beginning of the card.

I actually used /opt to mount mmcblk0p3 as my debian partition.

Oh, didn't realize that. Thanks!

So to update the step-by-step by Maxoueb with the suggestions from Qole

We are assuming you are using (as in: installed and working) Qole's Debian image (debian.img.ext2, that can be downloaded from here: http://qole.maemobox.org/easy-deb-ch....6-2_armel.deb ).


1 --------

First step: create a new partition/format your memory card.
(easiest way: mount your card on a linux box, use GParted to resize/create the new ext2 partition)

Put back the card in your device, boot it up.

2 --------

Mount the current Debian image:

With this command (as root):


Mount the new formatted partition:

4 --------

Copy the whole content of /debian to your freshly formatted partition.
In the present case:

5 --------

Restart device

6 --------

Edit /home/user/.chroot (as root: "vi /home/user/.chroot" ). Note that "IMGFILE=/dev/mmcblk1p1" needs to be modified to meet your needs (ie. replace "mmcblk1p1" to the ext2 partition you created)

# Sample config for chroot

# Device or image containing Debian filesystem.
# Default: first in /media/mmc[12]/debian*.img*
IMGFILE=/dev/mmcblk1p1

# Filesystem used; must always be set when using a partition.
# Default: from extension of IMGFILE, or ext2.
IMGFS=ext2

# Mount point for Debian.
# Default: /debian
CHROOT=/debian

# New /tmp dir size for printing / PDF creation
# Default: 2M
TMPSIZE=2M

# Debian user to drop privileges
# Default: user
DEBUSER=user

7 --------

You can remove the debian.img.ext2, as it's no longer needed)

8 --------

Tap on the "Debian chroot" menu item. If everything went well, you should see it mount the Debian image from: /dev/mmcblk1p1 (or whatever partition you have chosen)

I found that there was no need to edit the /sbin/debian only the chroot.

If I "apt-get remove dbus", "the following packages will be REMOVED" => among others: "gedit", "gnome-app-install", "gnome-panel", "gnome-session", "gnome-settings-daemon", "gparted" etc etc., quite a lot actually (347MB).

How can I safely remove dbus without removing all these apps/libs?
(Also, during most app install, I get errors stating HAL isn't configured yet, and thus remains unconfigured => is that a problem?)

Thanks!

Another couple noob questions:

Is it /debian/var/lib/dpkg/info/hal.preinst and /debian/var/lib/dpkg/info/hal.postinst (from the chroot)?

Also, "put "exit 0"" => should the file be:

or

Thanks and apologies for the dumb questions!

Max - The first one exit 0 with no quotes.

And from maemo it would be /debian/var... from debian it would just be /var...

You can probably perform the same hack for dbus to get it to load in dpkg.. just change hal.preinst to dbus.preinst and same for postinst.

Thanks a lot!

Hi all, I'm trying to access the System->Administration->"Services" tool (from Gnome), but after I enter my root password (which is correct), I get an error message: "you are not allowed to access the system configuration".

Same when running "gnome-services" from debian chroot xterm session.

Any idea? Is it something related to dbus? (I applied Fatalsaint's modifs -exit 0- in dbus.preinst and dbus.postinst)

Thanks in advance!