Not sure if this interests anyone ...

I reflashed my N800 with OS 2007 (Bora) early this morning (until 6 AM) in order to use SciTE, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc. with the built-in software keyboard, and to use xkbd with DOSbox and Basilisk II (xkbd on OS 2008 is buggy).

But the build of Basilisk II built by t3h won't run on OS 2007.

So I needed a Scratchbox environment setup for OS 2007 SDK to attempt compiling it myself. As I may switch back to OS 2008 once certain apps are ported over to Chinook, I also wanted to have the OS 2008 SDK setup too.

The Maemo SDK VMware Appliance is slow on my desktop using VMware Server.

As I was already getting my low-end Thinkpad 600e ready for installing Xubuntu yesterday, I figured I would just use the VMware image instead of figuring out how to install both SDKs on one system.

I created and FAT32 formatted a second VMware hard drive file which I am dumping the SDK Appliance hard drive file as a Ghost image to (screenshot below).

Then I will use a Windows VMware guest with the 2nd hard drive file mounted to copy the Ghost image to my host file system for burning to DVD-R which can be imaged to my Thinkpad.

Sounds interesting. But drivers differ though.

I just set up Ubuntu install and installed scratchbox, xephr & SDK on it & Pluthon.

Thanks. I can follow the directions to install the Bora or Chinook SDK on a Linux system, but am uncertain how to install both on the same Scratchbox correctly.

BTW: The previous attempt at dumping the image to a FAT32 hard drive file failed due to the 2GB file size limit of Fat32.

So now I installed Ghost under a Windows 2000 guest and will attempt imaging the Linux hard drive file dumping it directly to my (NTFS) host file system via networking.

Oh right, I see. I just installed Chinook so I am not sure either.

The VMWare image does come with a lot more programs then just vanilla scratchbox install on normal linux so this could be good

I don't know if this helps any but vmware does have the function of mounting one of it's virtual hard disks as proper hard disks in the host operating system (at least on Workstation 6.0.2 ACE Edition. I tried mounting a linux virtual hard disk in Windows. I installed "Ext2 Installable File System for Windows" and it worked.)


Also, http://www.bananus.dk/2006/09/18/tra...sical-machine/

Good luck

Thank you for the suggestions.

On my system, EXT2IFS and TrueCrypt interact causing BSODs when mounting TrueCrypt images. So I uninstalled EXT2IFS a few weeks ago.

I tried the Personal Backup Appliance you linked to. I can't get VMware to boot off the 62 MB ISO downloaded from PBA's webserver ... it keeps booting off the Maemo VMware appliance despite trying tricks to get the BIOS screen to allow me to boot off the CD (ISO).

So I ended up using the DOS version of Ghost again, this time to span the image. Luckily it automatically split the image at the 2 GB mark.

I have the VMware Disk Mount Utility, but ended up never using it. I also downloaded the Acronis TrueImage 15-day trial in case this doesn't work.

Hopefully I didn't waste all day getting image just to find out my Thinkpad (PII/366MHz, 224 MB RAM) doesn't like it.

I think window manager wise, you would be ok. XFCE is pretty lightweight.
You would have to dpkg-reconfigure the xserver because vmware driver would not run.

As for the rest of it

So ... I finally got a Ghost image that I could map to my ThinkPad hard drive. When I went to restore it off the DVD-R (after about 9 hours trying to make the image), I fould out my Thinkpad's ~19 GB hard drive was a few dozen MB too small for the image and Ghost refused to install it.

I could have probably resized the original VMware Appliance hard drive and reimaged it, etc., but I gave up.

I installed Xubuntu, then tried Ubuntu on the ThinkPad ... both did not like my PCMCIA wifi card, had no sound, and there is a known issue with ACPI when using this laptop with Linux.

So I installed Windows 2000 Server on it and will use andLinux instead for Scratchbox\Maemo development.

As it is, xkbd for OS 2008 was released this morning so I reflashed my N800 with Chinook. I wish I could get SciTE working correctly on OS 2008 as GCC is installed and I could use SciTE for simple C/C++ development on my N800.

I'm sorry for the bump but what I did was install ScratchBox & Chinook SDK and I've started to extract stuff out of the vmware image by mounting it in my Ubuntu and integrating it into my real install.

I could try and get the Bora scripts if you want?

and to use xkbd with DOSbox and Basilisk II (xkbd on OS 2008 is buggy).


I think this has to do with the way the maemo developers decided to handle the keyboard.

xkbd emulates hardware at the X level while hildon-input-method works with the controls in gtk2. They chose this so that they could do fancy stuff like capitalizing first letters and doing various things by *context* rather than just providing input.

So, when you send keys throuhg xkbd, the maemo stuff interferes and you get messed up input. The xkbd program works fine if you are not in a modified control, such as using rxvt with the hildon keyboard turned off.

But turning off the hildon keyboard does not always work completely and you run the danger of getting lockups while using xkbd.

Practically, this means that there is no choice but to use their virtual keyboard since it interferes so badly with other virtual keyboards.