Hey All,

I've been lurking here for a while and finally decided to get the n810 a week ago with developing some software in mind. I've been linux-ing for a little while and have become pretty familiar with getting what I need for my Debian/*buntu systems. Without the bounty of apt repositories, I'm definitely in the dark at times, though... so maybe you can help with a few questions, which may be really stupid:

1. Some people have referenced the 'broken' tar on our n810's that returns the 'broken tar magic' error message. Has anyone found a workaround for this, or is there a way to install a 'better' tar? (thread here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8751 )
2. Can the tablet read ext2/ext3 partitions on the removable memory card if I format them that way? Bonus question: I modified the mmc-mount script to not mount the card as 'noexec,' but I still cannot chmod files to be executable. Any ideas why?
3. Where is 'make?' I've added several repositories I found on the maemo site (maemo hackers, etc.), but I still cannot find a 'make.' The closest I found was 'cmake,' but I'm not sure that I need to cross-compile.
4. As a general question, how horrible is it to just build code on the n810? I will probably go with scratchbox for speed reasons, but it'd seems useful to do it on the actual device when I'm ready, presuming it's not too slow.
5. I have the n810 working very nicely with my phone's GPRS connection over bluetooth, but I'd really like to 'hop off' when I get near a Wifi connection that I've used before. The n810 will do the opposite (when it loses wifi, it hops on to GPRS), but is there a simple way to make it do the former? Follow-up question: can scripts interface nicely with the connection manager, if I wanted to just write a simple wifi searching script to make it hop over that way?
6. Any recommendations for other file managers, or at least one that knows how to read from / instead of making me put files in silly predefined places?

I believe that's all for now. Thanks for all the great info on this board!

2. - Yes, it can read/write ext2/ext3 filesystems. That's how I formatted my memory cards.

6. - The terminal. :P That's a good question though, I haven't run into any good alternative GUI file managers yet. I think there is a GPE one you might want to try.

1) Tar works fine for me, the thread you referenced suggests using GNUtar or here's a link to the one I use which works perfectly for me: http://repository.maemo.org/pool/mae...osso_armel.deb
Also, you'll probably want to install bzip2, just run:
apt-get install bzip2

6) - EmelFM2 It's available from the garage I believe. There's a couple of tutorials on this forum

Hope this helps, I'm sorry I can't answer the other questions as I don't have any experience with coding on the device itself (except for Java, but I use the JXXX compiler service)

If you want a development environment on the tablet, you'll need to add the maemo.org SDK repo; you can get make and a host of other stuff there. It's not entirely safe though, as it's only intended for use on scratchbox, and could conflict with important things on the tablet... use at your own risk. It works for me, though.

I use the shell for getting around the filesystem, mainly, but GPE filemanager is a nice basic one, and EmelFM2 is a big hairy graphical-shell approach, which I'm not persuaded is a wise choice, but is by all accounts good for that sort of thing...

Great, thanks for the helpful info! I'll read that the SDK repository was not for the tablet, but had no idea it would actually work on the device. Oh, beloved make, you are so close now.

Yeah, I use the terminal for all my filesystem stuff too (and found a version of bash in one of the repositories, which is oh so nice), but I was just curious if there was anything around. XFE is my favorite for my desktop machines, but I think it's a little complicated for the tiny screen - I might try it out just for fun, though. I had tried EmelFM2 a while ago, I believe, and found it to be a little too awkward for my tastes - I'll give GPE a shot.

josiah: thanks for the deb link for tar, I don't know how I missed the comment about GNUtar in the thread.

Hi Pebby;

Any progress on being able to chmod files on removable memory so that they are executable? I'm hoping to do that, without having to go through the pain of cloning the OS to boot from the removable memory.

Thanks,

Steve

That's a filesystem issue; you'll need to use a UNIX-like filesystem (like ext2) instead of VFAT. One option is to use GeraldKo's cloning stuff, but only go partway; that's the easy way to get all the drivers, partitioning tools, etc. at once...

And thanks for bringing that up, Steve; I had missed the bonus question. You need to add a mode= option, I think, to make executable permissions on everything; because vfat doesn't have an execute bit, it's either all files, or no files.

Well, what's strange is that I tried adding an 'exec' to the list of mount options in mmc-mount script (and in /etc/fstab just for kicks), but it's still no-go. I will probably just format/mount it as ext2/3 to avoid the whole issue, but it's very weird since I can, for example, configure my eeePC's fstab to mount its SD card with full permissions for all.

Edit: BAM, got it. That tiny screen hid some more options in /usr/sbin/mmc-mount: just remove the lines regarding 'umask' and 'dmask' and you'll mount it will full (maybe too full) permissions. You're free to set umask/dmask to more sane values if you want too. Should we wiki-fi this information?

After wgetting and attempting to install the .deb through the package manager with the cryptic error 'tar failed to install' (gee, thanks), I tried doing it through dpkg --install at the command line. It tells me that it will conflict with 'busybox' and cannot be installed. As tempting as dpkg --remove busybox is, I'm thinking it's not a great idea.

josiah, how did you go about installing that .deb? I'll just install GNUtar as a backup plan, but I was curious how you managed to do it.

Hmmm I seem to remember I just downloaded it and installed it from the app manager. Hang on real quick and I'll uninstall it and try to install it again

EDIT: Okay I see what I did now. I installed it while setting up KDE Boot From SD back when it was a manual process :P

Here's the directions I followed, copied from Pronuke's thisweekinnuclear site:

Download tar from the link I posted previously and save it to "Documents"
Then you can (as root):

# cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/
# mkdir /tar-temp/
# dpkg -x tar*.deb /tar-temp/

Once you've got the executable saved to /tar-temp/ you can do a

mv /tar-temp/tar /usr/bin/tar
or
cp /tar-temp/tar /usr/bin/tar

then
rm -r /tar-temp

Hope this helps!