Debian In An Extend


Could you force a situation where xfce isn't loaded by launching the Extend tools and a Debian window manager by adding a loader to

/etc/pandora/conf/gui.conf?

I added a line that just loads a terminal and xfwm to get a "desktopless minimal" gui for compiling and tinkering, perhaps you could so something similar with your setup?
 
Great! You aren't supposed to do this yet. I'm spending what little time I have getting used to the subtle differences of the firmware and you bring these excellent gifts out. Thanks for all the time and work you've done, this is awesome stuff, more life sucking, time killing good clean fun (until I introduce porn to my Pandora). Seriously, thank you for all this guys! I don't have much time to play this weekend but I'll peck away at this, need to get some more larger SD cards for the 4GB flavors.
 
I hope the 4GB version works, I don't have a 4GB SD card to test! If there's any issues, feel free to post, I'm usually fairly quick at replying and sorting things out ( reason how this thread exploded so quickly ;) )

I've had a look at that /etc/pandora/conf/gui.conf file.. very clever.. except, the script that runs that is perhaps a bit hard coded into it's ways. It will (correctly) perform a check on your WM that you've entered to see if it exists before even calling the current one to shutdown. Unfortunately for tinkerers like us, our WM doesn't actually exist in Angstrom's path domain, and the script isn't clever enough to know that when we put in something like "chroot /tmp/debextend /bin/bash" that the command we want it to check is just "chroot" and not the entire string ( which obviously fails )

Pretty clever little script though :)
Although, it hinders our efforts to buck the system somewhat... let's see how we can get around it without ripping it to shreds ;)

As for working late - I tend to work crazy hours pretty often, tis the nature of the game!
 
Stuckie said:
As for working late - I tend to work crazy hours pretty often, tis the nature of the game!
Click to expand...

Are you Batman? I figure he must be a Linux ninja... all those custom systems he has!
 
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Here's a quickie while I ponder on the X issue some more:
Arch Mobile - 1gig: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/SimpleDev/archmobile.1GbExtend.zip
ExtendUtils: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/SimpleDev/extendutils.pnd

I've updated extendutils as well so it's "OS Extend" instead of Debian Extend, seeing as there's now Debian, Ubuntu and Arch floating about now.
This version of Arch is a snapshot from ArchMobile using the sheevaplug kernel, which I ripped out ;) Don't need a kernel when chrooting in anyhow!

I've done the usual pacman -Syu so it's up to date, and I installed gcc on it as well ( habit from being a dev ;) need my tools! ). Other than that, it seems to be pretty clean and empty for mucking about with :)
Curiously, pacman throws up an error after installing anything.. no idea what that's about as it does finish installing things.

And sadly no, I'm not Batman.. just a programmer.
However, I do have another little trick up my sleeve ( though my Pandora is starting to scream at me for mercy, it's really pushing it now! )
If, in your chrooted environment, you install Xnest, you can do the following:
Xnest -geometry 800x440 -ac :1 &

Then, you can do something like:
fluxbox -display :1
Assuming you have fluxbox installed, of course ;) but you should be able to do that with any window manager.

The result?
X in a window!
xnest.png


As I said, really starting to push the Pandora a bit now with all this indirection going on... so I may need to get swap support in the ExtendUtils soon, otherwise, the kittens will be after me!
funny-pictures-this-cat-will-kill-you-1YX.jpg
 
Oh god. What are we doing? Where are we? How will this end?

We are now running Chrooted Debain and spawning another X for it within Pandora Angstrom X?

Does it work? Is it fast? How many kittens died to bring us this information?
 
It works, but we're running out of memory at this point as you'll probably be able to get your window manager up but not much else ( I picked fluxbox as it's very lightweight and I still had issues even opening xterm! )

Nothing a bit of swap wont fix, really.

Of course, replacing the current running X with the chrooted X, or getting Angstrom X to run chrooted WM would be better.. still working on it!
 
Stuckie said:
It works, but we're running out of memory at this point as you'll probably be able to get your window manager up but not much else ( I picked fluxbox as it's very lightweight and I still had issues even opening xterm! )

Nothing a bit of swap wont fix, really.

Of course, replacing the current running X with the chrooted X, or getting Angstrom X to run chrooted WM would be better.. still working on it!
Click to expand...

If we do either of those things, and kill XFCE etc. will we get the RAM back which we need? Isn't swap on an SD amazingly slow?
 
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Stuckie said:
Yes, we should get the ram back.
As for swapping on an SD.. probably not any slower than on a hard disk ( assuming the SD write controller's up to it! )
Click to expand...

I've found that reading and writing on the Pandora is ridiculously slow. Copying to SD card is the worst. <_<
 
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I'm really rather proud of you!

I'll just sit here waiting for the inevitable file list then. Is this a Debian image with Gnome or the original Openbox one? Can you upload something with Gnome etc?

Are we at the point that a Pandorapress news item is in order? B)
 
This is the original Debian sid image I created ( the 1gb one as I've no space! ), it's just got fluxbox and gdm on it along with gcc ( that dev tool habit again ;) ) and all dependencies they pulled in ( including the entire X server ) so it should work regardless of what image you pick - Debian, Ubuntu or Arch.

Essentially, it's very naughty what I did. I just wanted to see if it'd even work in the first place, so I forcibly killed X, then logged in at the raw tty ( CTRL + ALT + F1 ), chrooted in ( I still had everything mounted ) and typed the magic three letters - gdm.

Now to do it a cleaner way!

From looking through abuse's error logs, ALSA had trouble finding some files, so that should be a relatively easy fix.
WiFi isn't working either, but again, that should be a case of starting it manually as NetworkManager probably killed it on it's way out.

Going to be an exciting weekend, isn't it? ;)

As for PandoraPress.. I bet Gruso's been hovering about for a while now, but no.. it's not in a easy to use state yet.
ExtendUtils really does need that GUI as it's supporting a multitude of things now ( overlays, swap, chrooted installs ) and could do with some online help with what's going on, along with being able to catch errors properly.
Also, for the most part, stuff doesn't unmount cleanly as I've just forced stuff to bind to get things working just now.. need to do it a smarter way! Pretty sure anyone who was interested in tinkering with it has probably jumped on it by now :)
 
Late night hacking always pays off..
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH5veMSRp1U[/youtube]

This is Chrooted X running on VT2, the standard terminal on VT1 and Angstrom X running on VT7 as per usual.
I can jump between all three at will.

This is using my original debian-sid 1Gb extend, with fluxbox, abuse, X and gcc installed ( also the x11-server-utils package for xmodmap so my keyboard actually sodding works properly in Debian, it doesn't in Angstrom as the keybinding is for the Pandora keyboard, not my own! )

Again, I used my phone to record this at ungodly hours so I apologise for the crappy lighting and the somewhat muffled voice.. I have no better camera.
I need to check the changes to inittab to see if they are needed or not, then I'll have a look at seeing if I can get a nice little button or script to do this all for you.
 
For bonus points, try to chroot into another distro from the Debian chroot. You could have some hot Arch-on-Debian-on-Angstrom action. :p
 
I now have GDM behaving itself and starting up on VT2 with the login prompt as well so you actually become proper users, rather than root all the time.
That required some conf fiddling.. but that's within the chroot so I can do that in a pre-packaged environment.

Right... I'm going to do a from scratch OS extend now... probably Ubuntu with GNOME since that seems to be what the public is after.
I'll then be in a position to figure out what the bare minimum is to get other distros running in this crazy environment.

As for chrooting into something else, I don't have any space to do so! both my slots are being used just now to run this in a way I can trap what settings I've changed, and I only have 2Gig cards to test with ( I really should sort that and get a few bigger ones.. why is spam always about extending your unmentionables and not about extending your SD capacity?! Priorities, spammers! get it right! )
That said, there probably wouldn't be any issues.. other than the Pandora screaming at you for mercy ;) That said, I did mount 256mb swap as I was worried things would die.. it's only actually used 506k of it and there's still 30mb free of normal memory, so that 506k was probably just something checking if swap was available. Considering it's running two X servers and two desktop managers, that's pretty good going.
 
Unfortunately, that's not going to help me install the bugger... apparently, going through rootstock, the default Ubuntu-Desktop config is going to eat up about 2.5Gig of space... arse ( though this is pulling in firefox, openoffice, etc... )

Guess I get to do it the hard way, start from the base and add bits in! That'll at least get people started till I can get a decent sized SD card next week.
 
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