Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hi!

If you have installed Easy Debian, and you are having a problem, please first check the wiki page, then search this thread. If you can't find your answer, feel free to post your question at the end of the thread.

Update 02-Jun-10:

PR 1.2 broke our elegant keyboard fix (press the power button and clear the menu), so Easy Debian 0.9.50 (in Extras-testing) makes it so you just have to hit the Easy Debian icon again to get keyboard again in LXDE.

Update 26-Apr-10:

The new debian-m5-v3d.img.ext2.lzma image file is now the default for the Easy Debian installer. Please let me know if you have issues.

Update 26-Mar-10:

Both Easy Chroot and Easy Debian are now in Extras! Thank you all for your testing and voting!

If you wish to show your thanks for Easy Debian, you can either donate or you can go to the Easy Debian Download Page and give it 5 stars!


Update 09-Mar-10:

OK, I've pushed Easy Debian 0.9.46 and Easy Chroot 0.3.0 to Testing. These packages incorporate all the stuff we've been hacking out together, including the fix to make LXDE theme editing a possibility.

Please test and vote!

Also, if you have any questions (or answers!) please use the Easy Debian wiki page.

Update 22-Jan-2010:

The two essential Easy Debian packages (easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot) are now in the Fremantle Extras repository!

New packages coming to Extras-testing soon... as soon as people stop finding problems ;)


Keyboard problems are mostly solved worked-around. The fastest way to get keyboard in LXDE again is hit the power button and then tap outside the menu. This should restore keyboard to LXDE. (broken in PR 1.2, see above)


I recommend using the Easy Debian image installer (found in your N900s menu after installing Easy Debian) and putting the image in MyDocs.

I have a fairly preliminary image file on my server, but it will do the job for now.

Here are some issues that I need help resolving:

• Keyboard doesn't function in LXDE! Showstopper!
• Dialogs are almost useless under Maemo 5
• Drop-down choosers don't show text using "Beta" theme (see font chooser in OpenOffice Writer)
• GIMP crashes under Maemo when picture is touched with stylus

Beta testers are desperately wanted. Especially testers with some capability of fixing (or helping to fix) the above issues.

Thanks!

EDIT: You can follow my progress quite closely now. I do almost all my development and testing on-device, and use git (via Easy Debian of course) to upload my changes from the N900 to the garage.maemo.org project page. Just go to the git repository (labelled SCM on the project's menu bar) to see what's going on.

Interesting, it looks like you can see the on-device uploads by looking at the user name. If the user name is "user", it was uploaded from the N900.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'd like to help test, I'm not sure I can help fix any of the bugs tho :(

I've been running your debian-squeeze-m5-img.bz2 for a few weeks on the n900 and the only issue i've run into was the locale setting.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

N900 only or N810 testers too?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I need some N8x0 testers too, report results over in this thread.

EDIT: New thread linked above. Go there instead.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'm eager to start hacking on my N900 so once I get the time to set up Easy Debian on my new device I will try to help with beta testing.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I installed your image by downloading and unpacking it manually (had a bad wireless connection from the phone at the time - downloaded in on a laptop and later scp'd to the phone).

First impression - cool, Debian on a mobile phone :-)

The image is installed to MyDocs as per your recommendation. Still, I/O is slow but that's to be expected I guess. Have you tried to chroot directly to an exploded directory structure - ie. skipping the image mounting?

Will report more and try to get some feedback on the issues you mention in the first post.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Yes, waiting for the dm-loop kernel modules to be compiled for Fremantle; this should improve I/O speed to the image file quite a bit.

Yes, search for the many posts explaining how to run this from a dedicated partition rather than an image file. I haven't done that on an N900 yet, because I'm waiting to hear from more experienced hackers how repartitioning the N900 works for them.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

OK, I'll test, I have long experience with running debian on the HTC Universal.

I've been reading through the easy debian threads of yours, but it's very confusing, tons of pages etc.

I'm interested in running it chrooted off of a just a subdir on the MicroSD card, as that'll be fastest.

Can you briefly specify just a rough guide of installing it, as flipping through tens of pages is overwhelming:

Which packages and files necessary and is there a special chrooting technique for them?

Where is your debian rootfs?

If I just wanna expand it then experiment with chrooting it, what are the two packages easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot for?

Haven't inspected them yet, so it occurred to me, you might have them set up so that they download a debian rootfs image, is that so?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Repartitioning doesn't work.

But what I've done is flipped the fs types of mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2, mkfs switching them, the huge one was FAT, made it ext3 and vice versa.

Then mount them upon boot. Only the /home (i.e. ext3) will automount (the fstab is autogenerated upon every boot), you have to edit /etc/event.d/rcS-late and add the option to mount /home/user/MyDocs (the FAT one) - without this and a FAT system on it, the camera will not record pics.

Anyhow this way you get around 24 Gigs of ext3 in /home that's useable for any directory with chroot.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Is there a way to reset fonts to "desktop" size in pixels? This should solve dialogs problem. And Openoffice requires heavy tuning to save screen space.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I'm truly sorry. This is still an early beta test; I'm looking for people who either already know what this project is about or are willing to do the research to figure it out.

But, because you asked:

A good primer of the technical details of the easy-chroot project can be found here.

Easy Debian adds a more user-friendly layer on easy-chroot by adding an image downloader / installer and two scripts (/sbin/debian and /usr/bin/debbie) for using that particular chroot. It also adds a /home/user/.chroot file which has settings that can be modified.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I found installer to be extremely easy to use - just a fiew clicks; download easydebian-chroot from extras-devel with application manager, then run it, select target flash drive and that's all.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Thanks for this reference, I didn't see it before...

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I will preface this with I don't have a N900 yet. From what I have read you should be careful messing around with extras-devel with a N900 since you could download programs that have not been optified and cause your phone not to boot.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

the Easy Debian packages should not brick your phone. But you leave Extras Devel enabled at your own risk, of course. You might brick your phone or even download mplayer.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

It looks like the image may have some bad filesystem errors. e2fsck fails after a LOT of warnings. Maybe mine didn't download/extract properly? Does anyone else see the same thing?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I think you're right; despite the checksums and failsafes, it sounds like your install went badly.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Install went well on my N900. Just start to experiment right now :)
What is the root pw ?
I started synaptic from inside Debian and it asks me for the pw.
Or can i just use the synaptic-app that is now on my N900 ?
Nice work !!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

When you say, "inside Debian", what do you mean?

Synaptic should start without password if you run it from the Debian chroot; either choose the menu icon or open the terminal and type "debian synaptic".

It should work; I can't promise anything about how usable it is. The Fremantle UI might make it very difficult to use.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I've been playing with this for a day or so and it works pretty darn well. Next I'm going to install it directly to an SD card instead of using the provided disk image.

qole, you rock.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

awwaiid: Please, if you get the chance, do some speed tests between the MyDocs image file and the partition on the SD card.

That is, run something big like OpenOffice or Iceweasel from the image and then run the same app from the partition. Tell me how long it takes to run the app from the two locations.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I just created my own 3G image and copied your rootfs to it. Works great! Thanks.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I've just finished playing around with the system for about an hour and here are my first thoughts (I hope I'm not redundant):
- It installs very well on the N900 and it seems stable (I didn't have any crashes). It is somewhat slow but that's to be expected. I personally installed it directly on the N900 internal memory.
- Keyboard issue - Please keep in mind that I have a french azerty keyboard (no up & down arrow keys) so it may be responsible for the problems I've encountered. It was mentioned that the keyboard was one of the main "show stopper" issues currently being worked on and I can confirm. Even though the keyboard seems to function when openoffice is launched directly from the N900 menu, it doesn't work when LXDE is launched. There is a virtual keyboard but that really doesn't work very well especially since the N900 has a physical keyboard.
- The menu fonts are very large compared to the application fonts and often make the menus bleed into the regular application space
- The windows selection - ( _ and X at the top right-hand corner of every window to make it full screen, reduce and close) are very difficult to use because they are very small and the cursor seems to track poorly (when I use the stylus to point, the cursor lands systematically above it just enough to make it difficult to close windows etc.)
- Aesthetics (not very important) - it would be nice to have some pictures for the icons in the launch menu of the N900 to know what each icon does.

Besides that, it seems very stable for an early release and I must say WOW! I got an N900 because I figured it would be close to the linux OS (I've been using linux for 15 years when it was still in beta) and this application really makes me happy I got the device.
Thanks Qole for all your hard work - hats off!
Please let me know if you want us to test specific things.

-=AC=-

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I used abiword, running "time abiword" and then closing it as quick as I could once it started (so +/- a second on these). I did this several times in a row. I switched back and forth several times between the two configs, and got relatively consistent results:

MyDocs image -- 45secs first start, then 20secs, then 9secs, and then around 8-9 from then on.

ext3 partition on entire 8gb sandisk -- 17-20secs, then 8secs, then around 7 secs from then on. I just now left it sitting from there for a bit and then did this again and it took 28secs.

So far it seems that for me the sdcard is faster.

--Brock

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Thanks so much, Brock!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I mean when i started debian, and then open synaptic, a xterminal opens and asks me for a pw. Not the synaptic on the N900.
Sorry

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

qole, can you explain how the user accounts work in the image?

I see that there are both root and user (root being the default when you start the app)... with both of them having /home/user as their home directory. Should we just always use root or something?

Also, what are the default passwords for both accounts? How are they tied to the fremantle accounts (same /etc/passwd file?).

Finally, a question for all you users out there... what are you guys using on your n900 (i.e. what made you want to have this)? I personally use keepassx, gimp, hellanzb, screen, and saidar.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

twoboxen:

If, from the terminal, you run "debbie" to get a chroot prompt or if you run an app like "debbie appname," you'll run it as "user". If you run "sudo debian" to get a chroot prompt or "sudo debian appname", you'll run it as root.

If you want to set passwords for the chroot accounts, go in as root and set them yourself. The passwords aren't tied to the Maemo accounts' passwords in any way.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Openoffice renders the screen well when started as root, and the ugliness of the interface depends probably only on the settings in /home/user/ for the finger-oriented interface.
Now, since running as root might be a problem, the solution could be creating a new user and running as that with stylus-oriented widgets.
Its slow though, slower than on the N810. And sucks the battery quite quickly even if minimized. Why?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

debernardis: the real problem is not the screen you show, but the dialogs. Get a dialog, especially a big complex one, on the screen...

All you do when running as root is set the theme to default.

But since you are playing with theming, look for a nice dark GTK theme and install it to Debian and change ~/.gtkrc-2.0 to match...

Congrats on your N900!

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

What class SD card are you using? Mine is class 2

I have done some dd bs=4096 of=/dev/null and the SD card is slower than the internal 32GB.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Hey qole, thanks much, I've been running a chroot based on your image for about a week now.

Last night I even managed to compile and run GemRB/bg2 from the chroot. :D

I tried for quite a few hours last night to get sound working from the chroot. Thought it would be quite trivial given that the entire sound system is pulseaudio based. But could not for the life of me get the chroot to connect over tcp or unix sockets :(

This is probably the first instance where an aspect of the n900 feels crippled to me in some way (pulseaudio).

Thanks again, hope you or someone else can solve the audio dillema

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Yes that's true. Though, I remind that initially the N8X0 had similar problems; then when the UI size was decreased to the minimum (80%), all dialogs fitted into the screen. The new device has similar resolution so it should allocate the dialogs the same way.
In order to do that, we should get rid of the title bar. Maybe through wmctrl? I'll go on trying. And, we should "free" the dialog postion on the screen - but this seems much more difficult :(
By now, the thing that bothers me more is the extreme slowness and unresponsivity of the program. Do you have any hint to the reason, Alan? I tried to renice the running process but with no luck.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

go1dfish: I don't know either. I couldn't figure what the magic pulseaudio settings are. We probably have to copy some N900-specific plugins or files to the chroot...

debernardis: I don't know why OpenOffice is slow either. Unlike others, my "Class 6" microSD partition seems terribly terribly slow... And there's no turbo loop for Fremantle, so that's slow too.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

I suspect there is something slowing it. Data I/O from the SD partition can't explain while it is totally unresponsive in text entry, in comparison to what we got on the N8X0: so, there must be perhaps some kind of mechanism "nicing" the app; or allocating too low a memory for the application to work.

EDIT:
After some time openoffice writer seems to settle and become more responsive, almost like on the N8x0. I still have no clue on the reasons of such slugginess, though I suspect that much of the app code is swapped and this could be the culprit.
Being able to work, I could modify some properties and get a more manageable screen, like in the attached screenshot.
Modal dialogs are still a problem, though less because their font has been reduced. We need a way to move modal windows and reduce the height of the title bar.
Wmctrl did its job of maximizing the window; now we need a key combo to do that and a daemon which listens for it. Maybe those for easy debian will work?

Also, another problem, at least in my hands, is that the screen seems insensitive to the stylus pressure in an area about 1 mm around its edge, so the cursor can't reach those widgets that approach it closely. Is this a common problem, or it's just my device? I did screen calibration but nothing seems to change.

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Is it possible to install apps directly from the debian repository?
I want to use Inkscape, Audacity, pcmanfm and kile...
I think the image-filesystem is to slow, but there should be enough space on the 2GB-partition to handle the installations.

There are 3 possible solutions for the "misplaced directory/partition"-problem:
1. use the 2GB-partition as root-dir(/) after reading files needed to boot)
2. move and symlink all the installed files to the 2GB-partition
3. move and symlink the /usr-directory to the 2GB-partition (moving the files needed to boot to another directory and change the links)

What do you think?

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Sorry for cross posting, but I thought that someone interested in this thread knows the solution to my problem, and besides it's possibly related to easy debian on the n900.

As I have described in this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...610#post427610, I have all of a sudden lost the ability to connect to the internet. I can connect to my wifi router, and I can also establish a 3G/3.5G connection, but I cannot ping any address nor open any webpages.

Somehow it seems related to my easy debian install, cause if I try "debbi ping google.com" everything works (as opposed to "ping google.com" which gives me an error message).

I have tried rebooting several times, changing the connection, and unmountung the debian system, but without result. I can only connect to the internet through easy debian.

I should also mention that I can make skype calls, so perhaps some port is blocked?

I really hope some of you gurus out there can help me out

EDIT: SORRY, nevermind. It turned out to be a problem related to wrong info in /etc/resolv.conf on the base system (caused by vpnc)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

installing aps.

yes it is possible to install all apps from the debian repositories.
i enlarged the file to 2GB and installed:

- tuxpaint, gcompris (children-games)
- abiword (word-processor like openoffice-writer) only fast and responsive
- gnumeric (spreadsheet like openoffice-calc. very fast)
- artsofillusion (3d-modeller in java) very slow/doesn't fit into the
standard-screen. workaround: vncserver/viewer

openoffice-writer got usable after disabling the dictionary/auto-correction.

gnumeric: on non-english-keyboards you can't use cursor-up/down, because of the combined meta-key which is wrongly interpreted by gnumeric.

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I can confirm that. after turning that off the initial sluggishness was gone.

Another thing that works great is amule. especially when ICH and encryption is disabled.
Attachment 5086
:)

Re: Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing
 

Good news!

Thanks to qobi's little utility, I've started moving forward on getting Xephyr working!

I should have a new image ready before Christmas with a Fremantle-friendly desktop for apps that don't work well in Maemo-5!

Rejoice, desktop app lovers!

(also, thanks for the tips about turning off spell-checking, that will help a lot)