Debian On An Sd Card


Stocker said:
Well I've just tried on a fresh install of the 1.0.2 image and it won't pickup my BT router at home. Odd.

If I click on the wifi icon in the taskbar it says 'device not ready' under wireless networks. If I toggle wifi back off it changes to say 'no network devices available' which makes sense.

Another thing I noticed - When the wifi was working earlier, when I went to shutdown, I was given all the choices, i.e shutdown, reboot log off etc. But this time with the wifi not working I only get Logout and Cancel.

Exactly, it's the same for me too. First time i have had the choices.. second one no, and wif isn't working...
 
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This confuses me greatly, as I've never been able to reproduce any of these issues, even when purposely trying to bugger things up.

If you get the "Device Not Ready" error, could you please run "dmesg" in a Terminal and post the output that it gives about the wireless starting up, finding firmware, etc.. and any other oddities you find in there, as I only have the one Pandora here to test things with, and since it works on that, I'm utterly stumped as to what's wrong :(

You'll need to pipe dmesg out to a file on your SD card, since you obviously have no WiFi.. do something like: "dmesg > MyDmesgLog.txt" in your home directory so you can fetch it back in Angstrom.

--edit--
I've just repartitioned a 2GB card to ext3 and extracted the 1.0.2 rootfs on to it and booted.. without any issues.. I can't seem to reproduce any of these issue on my own Pandora.
Amusingly, ext3 seemed quite a fair bit faster than ext2... but I doubt it'll make much difference in getting it to run for those having issues.. short of me getting another Pandora for testing, I'm utterly stumped.

Only other thing I can suggest is to manually go through the guide and see if it works for you ( post here if there's anything you're stuck with - such as Apt's sources.list which I didn't really go through. ) If it does work, I'd be very much interested in a tarball of your rootfs to diff against mine to see what's changed.

My next trick is to debianize the Pandora specifics anyway... so as chris_c just pointed out to me, perhaps having a minimum bootstrap with a bunch of debs which install themselves is the way to go. Pandora Angstrom already does this to a degree as there's a bunch of ipks it installs during the first-boot wizard, perhaps that's for exactly this reason!
 
I did this on a 2gb card and I have wifi working and a full logout and shutdown option when I logout. Odd! It seems to have survived multiple reboots and reconnected to wifi every time. I've installed nmap, leafpad and software centre via apt-get (also performed a apt-get update too). It seems to perform really well.

All SD card prep was carried out on a Debian 6.0 VM on my laptop. I did try this direct on pandora using GParted, but kept getting errors when creating the ext2 or ext3 partitions. Both cards i'm using are old spares so they could well be suspect.

I've partitioned 256mb in an extended partition at the end of the card for swap (assuming I may need this in the future). The rest of the 4gb card has been partitioned as a ext3 primary partition. I will test this card later as the pandora just died from lack of charge.

The command i used to extract the archive to the card was 'tar xvfp pandora-squeeze-1.0.2.tar.bz2 -C /media/deb'.

If I do get the wifi and shutdown problem again I'll make sure I post the output from dmesg.


Thanks for this Stuckie. It's great fun to play with!
 
.xsession is not being run as its for the "default" session or "1. Run Xclient script" as gdm has it
i believe the lxde session stuff is in .config somewhere I'll have a poke around

At the very least I want to enable the Pandora menu key again!

I'm going to experiment with slim though, although I don't seem to have pnd stuff working
however the op_wifi script the wifi pnd runs works just fine and I can connect very well to wifi

I've other stuff to mess with but I should have something you can try to see if my take behaves oddly on some machines
too.... (I still cant get my head round what the problem might be)
 
Well, with chris_c's rootfs, I managed to get a broken image!

Don't think I've ever been so happy to have something break on me... hehe...

Anyway, I've finally managed to figure out what causes the issues with the WiFi and session management. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you do the following and reboot, everything'll work.

sudo rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
sudo chmod +x /usr/lib/dbus-1.0/dbus-daemon-launch-helper

That's it.
Answers on a post card as to why giving global execute writes on the launch helper fixes things.. it HAS to be an underlying permission issue somewhere, but then, how on earth would anything work?!

I'll probably re-up 1.0.2 this weekend with that fixed.. but for the moment, for those with the no wifi and shutdown/reboot options, do the above two lines and reboot ( "sudo reboot" in a terminal. )
 
Stuckie said:
Well, with chris_c's rootfs, I managed to get a broken image!

Don't think I've ever been so happy to have something break on me... hehe...

Anyway, I've finally managed to figure out what causes the issues with the WiFi and session management. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you do the following and reboot, everything'll work.

sudo rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
sudo chmod +x /usr/lib/dbus-1.0/dbus-daemon-launch-helper

That's it.
Answers on a post card as to why giving global execute writes on the launch helper fixes things.. it HAS to be an underlying permission issue somewhere, but then, how on earth would anything work?!

I'll probably re-up 1.0.2 this weekend with that fixed.. but for the moment, for those with the no wifi and shutdown/reboot options, do the above two lines and reboot ( "sudo reboot" in a terminal. )

nice one stuckie and chris; wifi and session management working :)

edit

synatic manager does not want to run from preferences menu?
 
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change the desktop file so it uses gksudo synaptics ?

I'll be honest I've been running it from the terminal or using apt-get - as I'm using the terminal a fair bit at the moment!
 
chris_c said:
change the desktop file so it uses gksudo synaptics ?

I'll be honest I've been running it from the terminal or using apt-get - as I'm using the terminal a fair bit at the moment!


hi sorry how do i do this - change desktop file?

edit

hmm tried running gksudo synaptics from terminal and getting error message

Glib-Critical g_str_has_prefix:assertion str §= NULL failed

also what is the root password?

thanks!
 
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thanks sudo synaptic works

edit

by the way waht is the redlight that is normally is the blue bluetooth light?

also desktop shortcuts dont seem to stick for example when i make shortcut for wifi toggle? on reboot it dissapears?
 
oddly gksudo was failing for me but now it works!

anyhow so you can run it from the menu

edit synaptics desktop file with something like

sudo mousepad /usr/share/applications/synaptic.desktop

scroll down to the bottom to the Exec= line and replace it with

Exec=gksudo /usr/sbin/synaptic
 
I'm doing a final pass over everything this weekend to get this as a stable "final" before I start recompiling stuff properly and doing the whole Pandora-specific Debian repo thing.

This will give a much smaller rootfs as the current one has an entire dev environment which is perhaps a bit useless for most people, but will be what'll be used to compile the Pandora specifics for the 1.1 release.

Don't expect a 1.1 release for a LONG time! This is why I'm getting the current stuff as stable as I can just now ;)

Also:
by the way waht is the redlight that is normally is the blue bluetooth light?
I've never seen it as a blue light? It's the bluetooth light anyway.. Debian seems to start it up somewhat by itself.

also desktop shortcuts dont seem to stick for example when i make shortcut for wifi toggle? on reboot it dissapears?
Not sure about this one.. might have a look into it after I get 1.0.3 out the door.
 
And 1.0.3 is finished and available here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/Debian/pandora-squeeze-1.0.3.tar.bz2

It's actually pretty much the smallest release - smaller than even the 1.0.2 minimal rootfs!
It's about 210mb and extracts to about 800mb.
There is no minimal release for 1.0.3

There is no theme for LXDE installed, so the notifications do not appear.. they are working, however, and if you install a theme you'll get them back. Additionally, pndnotifyd is being strange again, and only seems to kick in after opening a terminal. Not quite sure why, but there you go.

1.0.3 has the following:
LXDE-core ( so it's stripped down. )
Epiphany ( just the web browser this time ;) )
Synaptic ( with the link changed to use gksudo )

Changes from 1.0.2:
Hopefully the WiFi and Session Management stuff is all fixed now!
Added the .asoundrc as I'd forgotten it till now.
Removed all the dev stuff and extra fluff that was in 1.0.2
Importantly, this does NOT have a set of Pandora Angstrom compatibility libraries - they were installed via trial and error to begin with, and some were a tad iffy.. so you'll either need to go back to 1.0.2, install them yourself, use Angstrom for your PND needs, or wait for 1.1 - which will likely be a long wait!
You have the entire Debian archive at your disposal anyway, so I'm sure you'll be entertained for a while ;)

Right, any issues, let me know!
 
Stuckie said:
also desktop shortcuts dont seem to stick for example when i make shortcut for wifi toggle? on reboot it dissapears?
Not sure about this one.. might have a look into it after I get 1.0.3 out the door.


hi

shortcut does seem to stick now, but icon for shortcut not appearing

cheers

edit

that is on 1.0.2
 
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Ah, I think I see what you're doing now, and why it's not quite working.

You're making a shortcut to a PND.. pndnotifyd handles these and it seems to be a tad off in my Debian releases for some reason.
If you truly want to make a shortcut on your desktop to toggle Wifi, rather than going into the menu, make a shortcut to /usr/pandora/scripts/op_wifi.sh instead.

--edit--

If you grabbed 1.0.3 before this post, please redownload.. I missed something out in my own instructions! So I've highlighted them a bit better.. effectively, the startup scripts cause Debian to have small fits if they're not tweaked slightly; which I forgot to do.
 
Stuckie said:
Ah, I think I see what you're doing now, and why it's not quite working.

You're making a shortcut to a PND.. pndnotifyd handles these and it seems to be a tad off in my Debian releases for some reason.
If you truly want to make a shortcut on your desktop to toggle Wifi, rather than going into the menu, make a shortcut to /usr/pandora/scripts/op_wifi.sh instead.

--edit--

If you grabbed 1.0.3 before this post, please redownload.. I missed something out in my own instructions! So I've highlighted them a bit better.. effectively, the startup scripts cause Debian to have small fits if they're not tweaked slightly; which I forgot to do.


hi okay gonna redownload 1.0.3 but noticed in the first 1.0.3 that if you let debain timeout the system has no response - have to take battery out then plug into mains?
 
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I don't quite understand what you mean?

Timeout in which manner?
If you mean rebooting or shutting down in that it sits on a console screen for a while - I'm not quite sure what it's doing, but it seems to be ok if you leave it a minute.. it's showing the wrong console effectively so you can't see what it's up to.

If you mean like a screensaver, there is no screensaver stuff installed, so technically nothing should happen.
--edit--
Having just tested this, it blanks the screen.. but I was able to recover it just by moving the nub or pressing a key so, still not sure what you mean.
--end edit--

However, it doesn't quite check the battery properly at the moment, so you need to ensure you're not running low ( the battery icon in the system tray will turn orange then red when it's getting iffy ) else it will just turn itself off.. it won't flash the "low battery" LED as a warning.
Least I don't think I've fixed that.. it's hard to tell when the Pandora has such long battery life that I'd need to leave it for hours and hours to test something like that! ;)
 
actually looks like a fault with my battery? it seems to shurtdown after displaying low battery percentage even though battery montor reports 80 percent.

if this happens again will raise separate thread, searching forums no such issue like this seems to have popped up before?
 
I've not had any issues like that; only thing I can suggest is ensure your battery is connected properly as they're fickle things and that can definitely cause strange behaviour.

The power manager icon in Debian certainly works for me and seems to report it accurately ( hard to tell other than rebooting back and forth and checking ;) )
 
I'd see how it behaves on Nand, and maybe make a boot sd from the "official" image, just to rule out anything that might be a debian problem, although I don't see it being that.

You could try taking your battery out for 30 seconds or so and booting into Nand and seeing how it behaves.

I have noticed sometimes the Pandora can get itself into an odd state which survives power off, which is odd as I was under the impression that each boot all the power settings were completely reset for just such a scenario.

Fingers crossed its just one of those odd situations - thats solved by removing the battery
 
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