Debian In An Extend


SomeGuy99 said:
Open Office? This should be interesting! I bet it takes 3 minutes to load up.
Click to expand...
I guess MS Office would be much slower. :D

Interesting hacks here. I don't know if the "normal" Pandora OS can benefit from this but I'm open for everything that hacks more speed in our Pandora :)
 
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fusion_power said:
SomeGuy99 said:
Open Office? This should be interesting! I bet it takes 3 minutes to load up.
Click to expand...
I guess MS Office would be much slower. :D
Click to expand...

No offense to lovely, cuddly awesome Open Source, but Microsoft Office loads much faster.
 
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Looking good but i still want the full ubuntu desktop on my pandora,i have 32gb sd ready for it and plenty of time but dont know about a current arm image,well i have one but when i made a image to sd i didn't know how to boot it instead of angstrom.

I wont be happy untill we have the option of a full ubuntu install,the repo is better and the desktop enviroment is better,its a pity we cant emulate opengl instead of the need to port to ogles.

not happy is a strong use of words mabe just pissed at my lack of linux knowhow so i can do it on my own,im sure one day we will have other os options but what happened to boot from cdrom lol
 
Well, Ubuntu is an arse.. all day I've been trying to get the swine to work.. Karmic and Lucid both have this thing called Upstart to replace the standard System V init system.
Problem is, this is very very unfriendly to chroots as upstart wants PID 1 - which it obviously cant get when started in a chroot.

However, in a round about way, I finally got it to play ball...
UbuntuFinally.jpg

I need to try and get GDM or something up and running else you'll only ever be able to login as root, which isn't exactly secure.
Though there are chroot versions which allow standard users to call chroot, so I may look into them.. I know they're not installed by default on the Pandora, so I'll need to include them in the PND.

But bloody hell that was painful.

Oh and OpenOffice took about 45 seconds to load, not 3 minutes :p

Also, I just switched back to Angstrom and in the terminal I started X from, is a bunch of warnings stating:
Warning: Multiple doodads named ""

lol, what a great warning "multiple doodads" ... I assume it means widgets ;)
 
Right, I have Ubuntu 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope ) running without any issues at all. It was the last one using the System V init setup, so was fairly simple to get going.

Caveats to Ubuntu running IN THIS MANNER are as follows:
I currently have it as a 4Gig extend file.. there's about 2Gig free of it for use. I can shrink it down to a 2Gig extend ( that will just fit and eat an entire 2Gig SD card ) but you'd be left with ~400Mb
Speedy it ain't ... this can be resolved somewhat by logging out of XFCE but while that's shutting down, it'll disconnect you from the Wireless and stuff, which isn't ideal. There will probably be a way around this however, such as binding the right bits so it understands the hardware.
You do have to edit /etc/inittab for that extra TTY to spawn for Ubuntu ( or any additional X server ) to run on. I can write a script to automatically do this for you, however.
Some of the binds are a bit twitchy at coming off - /Angstrom and /media, where /Angstrom is a link back to root should you need to copy stuff over from the NAND. You're best restarting after using this to unmount properly.
If you jump back into XFCE, it steals the CTRL+ALT+F# shortcuts, so you have to go to a terminal and type "sudo chvt 2" to get back to Ubuntu, whereas you can just press CTRL+ALT+F7 to jump back into XFCE ( or SLiM, if you logged out .. or MiniMenu, but I'll be honest in that I haven't tried this yet. )


Unfortunately, I just found out that when calling rootstock there's parameters for a user/pass .. I had thought this would be creating a standard user account, but no, it creates a system user under that name and chowns EVERYTHING to it ( which might explain some of the issues I had with Karmic and Lucid, ) so I'm going to redo Jaunty just now ( which'll take a couple of hours. )

So, while all this is going on, I have some questions:
Do you want a 4Gig Extend with some space in it? or a 2Gig Extend with very little, but it's more likely to fit on your SD card? ( you can add an overlay later. )
Do you want the Base images as well? for Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid? These won't have X installed, they're base images to start with!
GNOME, XFCE or KDE? ( I could probably do all three, but you're starting to chew up my server space :p )
Any special requests for packages and so forth?

I again warn you that doing this stuff is immensely hacky ( but fun! ) and you'd probably be better off running from an SD card if you wanted to seriously use the system as it stands. This wont ever change, as there'll always be extra services running in Angstrom that you probably wont get running your distro direct from SD, but the benefit is, as stated, you do sort of get full driver support as it sits just below in Angstrom ticking away ( just may need linked in, ) and you can jump between the two at will.

Also, I'm glad my desktop machine is essentially server-grade ( albeit a few years out now ) ... running four rootstocks at once is quite intensive, but I still have a couple gig of ram left, and I still have some process time sitting twiddling it's thumbs!
 
Hello waiter. Okay, I'll have the Jaunty Jackelope.... 4gb portion please, with a main course of Gnome.

And my friend will have the same I believe. What, side orders? Hmmm, let me think...
 
Quick Howto before I forget, and as I've just done it again:
Starting GDM in a chroot on a different host VT.

You need to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf ( most distros have this, unless you're Karmic or Lucid Ubuntu ( lucid? really? *cough* ) )
You'll need to find where it says FirstVT, where it'll be marked as 7 ( or perhaps 8 .. used to be GDM/KDM/XDM ran on VT8 and your desktop manager ran on VT7. ) You want to change it to 2.
Further down the file, you'll come across: 0=Standard /dev/console ( /dev/console seems to change to other things, I've noticed, the important part is the 0=Standard bit )
Comment this out ( add a # in-front of the line. )
Write: 1=Standard vt2
( Sometimes this is actually in the file already.. just make sure it has vt2 on it and is uncommented. )

Save the file.
/etc/init.d/gdm restart

This assumes that in your /etc/inittab you have the following line:
2:2345:respawn:/bin/chroot /PATH/TO/CHROOT /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
( in our case, this'll usually be /tmp/debextend or whatever I feel like naming it at that point in time :p )

[edit]
Forgot to mention, you wont need to do any of this.. this is just for reference as to WHAT is going on.
This is only required when you don't forward in dbus, as the chroot won't know where your actual X is.

Also, uploading now.. there'll be a new post once it's done...
[/edit]
 
What about a 3gb extend ,i have a 4gb card for use ,i have a 32gb card with loads of stuff on it just now so i don't want to format it untill i back it up ,but a 3gb would be fine ,well what i mean is ,i have a 4gb card so would your 4gb extend fit on that ? is it slightly smaller as my card isn't a full 4gb more like 3.75gb.


superb work btw im sooo looking forward to using it and i echo SomeGuy99's gnome desktop request :)

I wonder what it would take to have xbmc running on the pandora as that would be perfect for pandora also notebook remix is nice well actuly no its not so nice but moblin is very nice.

I don't think i have ever sit and refresh a page before like this :lol: i make tea and biscuits for everyone. :p
 
And so it begins! It's up! Go grab it!

For those that like a menu item to say "Start Ubuntu", I've split this from the main ExtendUtils suite.. it will work with ExtendUtils as well, but it wont automatically start GDM, so you'll need to do that yourself if you'd rather stick with the ExtendUtils suite. ( which has been updated as well, by the way.. )
I imagine that Ubuntu may need some "special love" to get optimised and work correctly, which is why I've split it for the moment.. that and you might want to get "dev access" to Ubuntu without calling GDM up automatically.
Once I have time to sit down and do a proper GUI-based thing, everything'll be brought back into the one app.

So, what will you need for this to work?
One PND: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/UbuntuExtend/ubuntuExtend.pnd
One Extend: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/UbuntuExtend/ubuntu-arm-jaunty-desktop-3.5G.7z

Stick the PND in your usual place for launching them.
Extract the zip to the root of your SD card/USB stick/mass storage device. Warning, it's about 3.5Gig!
Go to System->Start Ubuntu and follow the prompts.
Once GDM starts up, the default user is "ubuntu" with password "pandora"

Pandora Press and other news posting peeps, this probably still isn't ready for mass consumption.. if you feel like it is, gimme a PM first so I can try fix some more bugs before you post it! ( especially want to have another crack at the dbus/hal issues )

Some Q/A Stuff
--------------

Q> Can I update Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic or Lucid?
A> I'd advise against it till I sort out some things.. Jaunty was the last Ubuntu release to support both "Upstart" and "System V" init deamons. Chroot currently doesn't play well with "Upstart" deamons, so some more investigation is needed.

Q> Why's it so slow?
A> You are running TWO X Servers and TWO Desktop Managers, you know! However, if you log out of XFCE, you can gain a speed up - be warned that at the moment, you also lose WiFi access due to NetworkManager shutting it down when you log out. Need to look at this a bit more. Might be able to get it back up and running by doing the dbus fiddling below.

Q> How do I change back to Angstrom?
A> You only need to press CTRL+ALT+F7

Q> How do I get back to Ubuntu?
A> Ah, this is trickier... you need to open up a Terminal and type "sudo chvt 2" as XFCE seems to want the button combination for something else.

Q> Can I exit Ubuntu and take the card out?
A> Unfortunately, due to some of the binds becoming recursive, it's not easy to unmount this.. your best bet is to reboot once you're finished, and then you can take the card out. Sorry about this! But it's a first release! ( sortof :p )

Q> Why is the Extend a slightly odd file size? ( just short of 3.7GB )
A> It's so that you can actually fit it on a 4GB SD as a 4GB SD isn't fully 4GB .. and I was testing with an 8GB PSP Memory Stick in a card reader hooked up via USB so I could have two of them on - a clean one and a "testing" one.. that and I only have 2Gig SD cards otherwise.

Any other questions, post and I'll get to it.
This is still very hacky.. there's issues with DBus at the moment, but I'm working on it.. to create a user, you'll effectively need to bring up a terminal and do it "by hand" - adduser <your username>

If you're determined though, an interesting way to speed things up a bit and allow Ubuntu to behave itself a bit better, is in the Ubuntu Terminal type: "sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart" however, this has issues with HAL, so do NOT logout of Ubuntu as you will lose your mouse and keyboard input and therefore have to do a hard reset ( Pandora button plus slider. )
That will allow Ubuntu's administration tools to work correctly though, so you can get a GUI to add users and so forth... might allow NetworkManager inside Ubuntu to take control over the WiFi as well, haven't tested yet..
This speeds things up because it kills most of the Angstrom related services as it doesn't understand them, or know what they are.

What this does is kills dbus from Angstrom and starts the Ubuntu one, however, HAL doesn't like being started in a chroot.. so we need to try and HAL to restart from outside the chroot somehow ( you probably could do this by jumping back to Angstrom and doing /etc/init.d/hal restart there.. and probably /etc/init.d/dbus restart when you're finished fiddling with Ubuntu )

There's so much stuff to test that I'm putting this up now for people to pour over, hack about with it, and help improve it :)
That and more eyes over what's going on is always better.. as no doubt someone else can come up with a way of getting hal/dbus running correctly.

Oh, and this doesn't do the inittab thing in the previous post.. it's not required it seems, but it DOES have the gdm.conf modified.
 
Dinner's in the oven kids.

Have you seen the viewcount on this thread? A lot of hungry F5ers.
 
yip thats the full size of the card ,iv backed up around half of my 32gb but ill need to get round to clearing it this week for the pandora,you did the right thing going for 4gb tho coz you can waste that 2 gb in seconds with stuff and anything under would be pointless but i was thinking with those other extends for synaptics ,when installing stuff would it not have needed much more to download as there was no full desktop installed with preinstalled libs ,so mabe with the full install you do't need to download so many packages when installing some general software like totem and so on.
 
Stuckie said:
3.5Gig version uploading now.. stupid 4Gig cards being at strange sizes..
Ironically, this is near enough half the size as the other one when zipped, probably because it's a fresh dd so all the used blocks are at the front and not all over the place.
Click to expand...

LOL. And i'm three quarters into downloading the other one too... :lol:

Too late to swap dishes now. B)
 
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This is messed up - ,now with all the inserting removing of my sd card in the pandora guess what's happened ? :( ohh and btw thanks for that 3.5gb extend Stuckie :)

My pandora will not read my sd card in slot 2 :( i was going to free some space on my other 32gb card so i could put the 4gb extend on it but no need now :)
 
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