Originally Posted by maemish
This tells you a bit of me, Maemish, one member of this community. I hope this gives perspective on what kind of guys are lurking here and sometimes asking questions. Starting to resemble my father to whom I always laughed when he tried to get the scary grey boxes on windows to disappear before reading what it said in them, and then he shouted to the stupid computer which jammed.

Today I tried to watch the latest maemo leste video. Downloaded it but it didn't work with N900. I was glad I was offered to download it in different form. I did but it didn't work either.

Next thing I notice is that each time when I'm about to close Opera it says there is incomplete download going on. What??? I'm not downloading anything anymore!!!! I close the Opera and open again and it says the same!!! What is downloading to my hacker device?!? Was it a corrupted video package, disguised as mp4 or something phishy embedded to the video? And I was so stupid to just download "something"!!!

Ok, I will empty the history and memory and everything from Opera. Same goes on! I use the cleaning app and autoclean and remove and purge everything which I don't understand what they do but I hope the best. Still saying something is downloadin!!!

Hah, I close the device and open it again!!! That should do it. Still doing it!!! But wait - maybe something is downloading to videos still. I go and check videoplayer and I see incomplete video there. I delete it and Open Opera. It just doesn't go away!!!

So I remove the Opera, use the cleaning app again, install Opera again - but as soon as I open Opera and notice it opens the recent pages (!!!) even though I had uninstalled it and cleaned and everything!!! I'm now sure there is some tunneling stuff going on on back and I don't know what to do.

At last I click the top bar on Opera. Downloads. Hmm. What's this? I cancel the incomplete download and - amazingly Opera doesn't anymore say "download incomplete"!!! Me and my hacker device, which I know how to use to surf web, take pictures, send both (!) sms and fmms and make phonecalls, are safe!!!!!!!

Phiuuu. That was a close one. But I mastered it!!!!!!!!!!! I'm a real hacker!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hahahaha
I don't know about "real hacker"....
1/2 right I think...
but
you are right Maemish..
like most of us here...
you definitely are a real "something"...
and don't change a thing man...
it is the epitome of Maemishness you would be messing with.

What happens when a windows Word user (well used libreoffice writer on linux some time but quite the same) tries to mount loop .img to sdcard? This is another informing post for the community.

Ok, so I just take this script losetup loop0 etc. and it will create a virtual diks mounting point. No rights to use the .img? Whaaat? It is right there on my machine! Who says I am not aloud to use? Googlegooglegoole. Clicking right click and giving rights to read and write and draw and bake. Not working. Something to clean up on sdcard. Re format. Not helping! Googlegooglegoogle. Finding some info of how to make it accessible. So now we are getting it working! Losetup loop loop! Access denied! Whaat? No right to make loop? I’m sudoing you know? Ever heard?

Not possible to mount! What is mounting (the thing mentioned on the script)? Googlegooglegoogle. So it is connecting it to device. But it is connected! Mount. Device is busy. Umount. No such file or path. Mount. Device busy. Umount… No mount point? What point? There is no point in this whole thing!!! Mount point. Googlegooglegoogle. Ok. So there is /dev/mmcblk0p2 and then there is the /media/etc.etc. So which is the mounting point? Googlegooglegoogle. Command mount! Shows that mounting is /media/etc. But the one thread said look system preferences. I click disks and then below partitions there are these +- and gears and click gears and there you see – the mounting point of the partition is something totally different! Googlegooglegoogle. Chown -R user:user plus /dev etc. After that suddenly the command sudo losetup loop0 works!

And scares me like…! There appears a new disk mounted with 6Gb! I didn’t stick anything to my computer! Is someone else on my computer? Googlegooglegoogle. Phew, it is a virtual disk and inside there is the content of the img file. I made it! Now just the next line to mount it to the location I want. Sudo mount loop -t ext4 etc. Aaargh. Access denied to write on sdcard! Whaaat??? Whyyyy??? Googlegooglegoogle. ”In linux we do things the difficult secure way”. Really? No one has rights to do anything unless you give rights. How am I going to give rights? What rights? Googlegooglegoogle. Chmod 777. Everything goes: read, write, whatever and whoever. I just want to make this happen. Trying to mount. Noooo! Are you root? I’m so roots man no one can be! Trying mount. Wrong fs type and super blocks and whaat? Need what helper programs? Feels I need them all! Googlegooglegoogle. Installinstallinstall utils etc. Did they help? NO!!!

To be continued in the next post (got feed back of being too long)...

Continued from previous post.

But what are these? Wrong fs type? Fstab. What is fstab? Googlegooglegoogle. Leafpad /etc/ etc. etc. and copy parameters from the net to get all rights in fstab and to have mounbt point there with all rights. Now it should work. Sudo mount loop… No. The whole partition vanished from the folder tree. Remove the parameters. But now I see there is suddenly many different folders on /media. I have created many virtual mounting disks without anything inside! And because they have got different names by my machine and I had got no clue of it I have tried the mounting with every time wrong mounting point path and it has created always a new one!

Use bleachbit with sudo and try to get rid of them and reboot and reconnect sdcard. Hah! They are gone! Let’s look inside sdcard. Nothing there. Back to media - and the wrong virtual disk folders are there again! NOOOO!!!! Googlegooglegoogle. Install pmount. No. Install kpartx and use with -a img but not undestanding what to do then. Just made some new mounting points and dev loops. Googlegooglegoogle. Rm devloop rm devloop rm devloop.

I give up! I try on windows. Download img file. Install 7zip. Un tar. Un zip. Un zip. It’s two a.m. and gonna wake up at six to work. And the 7zip is not doing it right. It needs to be done with losetup loop cause the img is a bit defferent. Sleep 4 hours. To work, open computer and start all over again. Doing same stuff. Nothing works. On a cafe next to me sits a guy, little over weight, hooded, beard, strong glasses. ”Are you a linux user?” Yes! OK, look, when I do this nothing happens as it should. ”Try typing this and that...” Guy looks how I try to find the right keys from a keyboard. ”Yes, I’m trying to install this hacker stuff on my phone”. I’m very convincing hacker. He starts to show me how I can use the keys in terminal to fill line with one clicks and stuff. A wizard! Never learned that magic! But no. Only thing I got from him was one humiliation more. At last think of updating system. On a cafe. With n900 hotspot. 2 hours just watching! After that went to spend time with my friend and decided to upgrade too. 3 hours! Now have spent on trying to sudo mount /dev/loop0 the content of the img to sdcard about 20 hours all together. Still not getting it done. But I have too partitions on sdcard. On the first is well working jessie through easy debbie (after I messed that up many times getting libc6 errors and many more after tried to first upgrade to get telegram desktop work without understanding what am I doing and then when I tried to install kali tools with katoolin by changing repos to kali sana without any success to get anything work).

Tomorrow is a new day. I will erase the whole sdcard, make one partition and start all over again. Maybe it was because of the block numbers of the partition? Who knows. I know only that I don’t.

OK hold your horses, in reality it is not that difficult!

One problem when following guides to do the more advanced stuff is that the people writing the guides don't even think about what could a newbie do wrong... when one has lived with this and breathed gnu stuff for tens of years one tends to forget every step is not self-evident to people still learning it...

But the good thing is that you are forced to learn really well when you try to figure out the why's yourself, that's the way to become a real hacker

I still don't think you get it maemish.
Just chopping a huge post into 2 ...ain't cutting it.

If you expect help.
or
If you expect to help others with a post of instruction (and its great to do it explaining along the way what didn't work)
or
If you expect others to read it and understand even ...

Then :

- Cut the superfluous crap
(save it for a different post...not one for help or instructions)

- Keep it tight sentence structure and concept -wise .
(sure somethings may need perhaps lengthier explanation to make
it understood to the new maemo folks who follow you and need
help...thats ok...but keep it as tight as possible.

- Use SOME kind of delineating structure to your explanation /
instruction.
ie:
- Bullet form
"Step 1(a)" format
even
"#1"
or
"A"
for each segment of the process...

ANY method to keep it simple for the reader to follow and implement.
It's ok if a particular segment that needs explaining at length is necessary.
Just keep to a format that people can "refer" to...
Not dig or sift or hunt through.

It does a disservice to those needing help your help on the topic in question, and looking in your post for it.
It does a disservice to yourself and others, who have to dig through your post to help you.

(hahaha...funny thing to all this..some folks here thought MY methods of explanation was bad!...yours Maemish....put mine to shame...)

Endso teaching how to write readable posts... Now I've seen everything!

So sorry for writing two confusingly. I really should have checked the header of my thread. If I would no how I would definately change it to "To a moose the community".

But seriously I appreciate your concern endsormeans (you have helped me so much here, even gave me the appropriate name) and I respect you sooooo much. When I'm done of messing while trying and not anymore just sharing my stupidity to a moose the community and show the truth of one member of the community I will definately try to ask help in the way you described, with a proper header and clearly outlined what is wrong, how and when and what I've tried. I have this problem that I'm not willing to give up untill I'm finished (I am finnish). Finished meaning I have not slept for many days and have got myself bad heart problems. And the worst thing is I don't have in my head any folders for computer stuff. if I read anything about worldviews, religion, psychology, philosophy or such everything is connected to previous knowledge and there are the mounting points ready for every folder and file etc. But this linux stuff is like water on a goose, nothing stays or connects to anything and can't make sense of what affects on what and how things work. I'm doing this like jumping from the plane with a parachute and then trying to figure out how it works before hitting the ground.

Starting this thread with this header was my way to answer that call "do not write off topic". Cause I tend to write stuff like that I thought that when people see the header they understand not to look after anything relevant informasion under there. Just to be amused or not, depending what they like the posts. So my thread tries to clean up the forum.

You may facing known problems.

some newer ext4 filesystems doesnt mount on maemos old kernel.
try "dmesg" after your "sudo mount loop -t ext4" and see its output.
Dont mess with /etc/fstab until you have a working solution with mount. (fstab uses mount)
Your "Chown -R user:user plus /dev" scares me.

maemo uses busybox losetup witch is missing the useful --partscan "-P" option.
So if you img contains partitions you cant do the following.
(On modern linux you can just use losetup -fP <absolute path to img> and you get all partitions like /dev/loop9p1 etc)

commands to mount a "partition image" file under maemo:
sudo gainroot
# prints first free loop device
losetup -f
# you can replace /dev/loop9 with the output from above
losetup /dev/loop9 <absolute path to img>
mount -t ext4 /dev/loop9 <path to dest mount point>
# on error watch "dmesg" !

# cleanup
umount /dev/loop9
losetup -d /dev/loop9

In the bright future maybe
"Better loop mounts with NBD"
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/nbdkit/
is coming and may allow users to get stuff done

if you have a hard drive image with partitons just boot to a more modern distro like devuan or leste on your n900.

@juice
hahaha ....I know right?
the irony is palpable ..
(but when it comes to explaining process / instruction I am all business and the fun rambling chat ceases)

@Maemish
The whole "feeling bad" stuff here..and "looking up to" (well it depends on how short you are Maemish..)...and "won't do whatever anymore ..."

Cut the bullsh#t.

This is about more than just yourself here...
Or what I want
Or my ego or yours.

at no point did I infer you can't write fun rambling stuff.

But do it in any other post than one you are:
#1 - trying to explain all you have so far done wrong in getting something to work, and require some help from others in figuring it out.
#2 - showing a process that may inevitably be helpful to others for solutions THEY need.

But...
If you work out the example problem you are dealing with...
in a fun and conversationally rambling way...
Exactly how much help are you going to be for the next guy who needs a solution and looks to your 40 pages for an answer inside it that may take up a paragraph in actual uncluttered step by step direction?

Write fun stuff...by all means.
But when posting process or instruction ..that is the time to be controlled, exacting, and all business