Debian On An Sd Card


I'd always assumed that it was because xfce was so slow....

while testing raw input from the touch screen hardware, I noticed no especial difference when either lxde or xfce was running

I concluded the lag was entirely down to the (comparative) bloated nature of xfce....
 
Pulled down 1.0.3 (guessed filename pandora-squeeze-1.0.3.tar.bz2) -- it seemed pretty unstable; | didnt' work in terminal so dpkg -l | grep fu was a pita :) wifi was really screwy .. may be atmospheric conditions today but it was totally fubar'd. Lots of little things like that,.

I'll have to re-detar the 1.0.5, and screw with the sources or something, perhaps. .. Another day :)

jeff
 
....or you could spin your own up from the wiki instructions, it takes less time than you'd think and ain’t hard :D !

Stuckie has done a really nice job on documenting his discoveries and laying them out in a clear manner
 
FouDuBassan said:
About the terminal, in which sens do you find it better? I only see the fact that even resized, it happened to resize itself with the prompt just behind the taskbar, regardless the configuration option, which is a pain in...
Click to expand...

It's a real pain copy/pasting things in xterm, especially with the pandora keyboard. Also there's no tabs, as far as I can tell.
 
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chris_c said:
....or you could spin your own up from the wiki instructions, it takes less time than you'd think and ain't hard :D !

Stuckie has done a really nice job on documenting his discoveries and laying them out in a clear manner
Click to expand...

I'm completely smashed for free time lately; someone should assemble a 'kit' for this, except its moving relatively fast -- ie: all the bitsd and bobs, x.org conf files, etc. I've already built up a cople firmwares from scratch, I've done my time ;)

I actually did somethign wimpiper before .. Debian debootstrap, add in minimenu, x.org, tslib, etc (I neveer bothered with networking etc), and good to go .. debian+minimenu; but I then decided to just go kernel+minimenu+(copy in /usr/lib from normal pandora firmware) and good to go, uber fast and tiny, but I never bothered to do it from OE, so its manual make, not automated build . ...

jeff
 
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Well, I've officially started work on 1.1 now.

Doing regression tests on an entire OS by myself wasn't for happening much anyway, hence the lots of 1.0.x releases that were kinda all over the place, as I needed you lot to check as much as possible ;)
I'm going to guess that 1.0.3's instability was more from some of the fixes I found for 1.0.4 ( the Wifi bug and some services going mad. )
Either way, I know what can break, how to fix it, and that Emdebian might be good for an end user thing, but the dev stuff can be a bit broken - and seeing as most people that'll be mad enough to go for Debian would be devs in general, I think I'll need to switch back to stock Debian by default.

I'm looking to start testing an installer towards the end of the month.
Work looks like it's gotten a bit crazy while I was away though so, not quite sure how good my time frame is, but we'll see!
 
So looking forward to the outcome of 1.1, I'd prefer the full desktop style experience or as close to as possible if you're looking for user feedback. :) Thanks for the continued work on this Stuckie.
 
Great to hear you have started work again (and nice to know you have the Pandora back).

I ordered 2 class 10 32gb SDHC's and I'm looking forward to abusing them. At the moment I have 2 16gb cards, and I don't do any card swapping - but I do connect the 500gb passport HDD at night to download torrents (strangely having this connected prevents the battery from charging, and the battery actually drains slowly so I've been taking it out. I don't understand why this should happen, the battery is capable of providing enough juice to power the HDD and pandora by its self, so why the mains adapter cannot provide enough juice is a mystery).

I've discovered the "smoothest" pandora OS experience is (for me at least) to run from NAND (with the SDHC pretty much as fast for most stuff). I've set up a couple of scripts to enable SWAP on either or both SD slots, and every card I have has partition 4 formatted as 512mb SWAP. If the OS is running from NAND, then reading the OS from there does not slow down swap access on either SD slots, will there come a time when Debian can be installed to NAND (for reading the core OS files only, and writes/extra apps to be directed to SD1)?

Also, will there be an option to make install the OS onto an EXT4 formatted partition - EXT4 is faster, and who cares if it's not safe - hahaha.

Thanks again for all the effort everyone is putting into this, I eagerly await an update to play around with. Hope you all are having fun with what you are doing, and if it's starting to stress you then take a break (there's plenty of fun stuff you can do with a Pandora to relax you know).
 
I've already got Debian running from NAND ;) though as I didn't bother doing anything to ensure it doesn't write willy-nilly back to the NAND, it's probably not completely useful... was a fun experiment anyway!

You probably won't be able to boot from ext4, but don't see what you couldn't run your rootfs from it. I haven't tried ext4 on Pandora yet ( actually, most of my PC partitions are ext2 with a few ext3 still ... mke2fs just rolls off the fingers really! ) but I wouldn't see much issue with it assuming the kernel supports it.. so I won't block it out for no reason.

As for the writes to SD1 thing.. I've been working on that with Extend Utils for Angstrom too.. I thought I had found a way of doing it, but it didn't quite work as expected, so some more fiddling is required. I'm plugging away at it though :) I believe you can also stack AuFS mount points too, if you unhide the whiteout directories... so I might be able to just do a complete bind out of / to SD1 on boot and be done with it. But yea, still needs work as it's not doing what I expect - IE: anything at all!
 
Stuckie said:
Well, I've officially started work on 1.1 now.

Doing regression tests on an entire OS by myself wasn't for happening much anyway, hence the lots of 1.0.x releases that were kinda all over the place, as I needed you lot to check as much as possible ;)
I'm going to guess that 1.0.3's instability was more from some of the fixes I found for 1.0.4 ( the Wifi bug and some services going mad. )
Either way, I know what can break, how to fix it, and that Emdebian might be good for an end user thing, but the dev stuff can be a bit broken - and seeing as most people that'll be mad enough to go for Debian would be devs in general, I think I'll need to switch back to stock Debian by default.

I'm looking to start testing an installer towards the end of the month.
Work looks like it's gotten a bit crazy while I was away though so, not quite sure how good my time frame is, but we'll see!
Click to expand...

F A N T A S T I C!
I can not wait to test an installer of debian on my Pandora! Cool!
 
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thank you for the fastest and simplest OS installation I've ever experienced! Please do keep up the good work.
 
xfce is definitely not a good solution because of lack of reactivity.
There is such a difference compared to lxce, and enlightenment is even faster.
Anyway, having a debian with all its packages is so great...
 
is it normal for the ext2 FS on my 16Gb, class 10 Transcend SD card to be corrupted after 5-6 package installations? i'm trying to install openssh-client and openssh_server but I always get an error at some point. i have tried both pandora-squeeze 1.0.5 and 1.0.6 (xopher's version). should i try another SD card or is installing stuff really that bad for the FS? has anyone else tried installing ssh?
 
i got two kinds of errors, both from dpkg. one was something like "dpkg unable to fsync updates status" and the other one was simply "dpkg I/O error". they usually occur when the installer tries to put / access files in /usr/share/man.

btw these occur both when running synaptic / apt-get and when i download and install the .deb packages manually.
 
Stuckie said:
Ah, suppose the "I/O error" gives it away a bit!

You could try running fsck on the card and see if it finds anything... but I've never seen that :\
I don't have my Pandora with me just now to pull down ssh and see what it's upto, but I doubt it's a repository error.
Click to expand...
I did that and e2fsck found errors at said locations in the FS and 'fixed' them. i then retried and got similar (not the exactly the same) errors. it is not specific to ssh, it's just that ssh was the first thing i wanted to install in order to avoid typing on the pandora keyboard. i also tried python-scipy and got similar errors. anyways, i'll try with another SD card later today / tonight and report back. thanks for the help!
 
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I get the I/O error too, mostly when compiling larger binaries on a cheap SD card. My genuine Transcend 8gb class 10 SD has no such issue :)
 
delete000 said:
is it normal for the ext2 FS on my 16Gb, class 10 Transcend SD card to be corrupted after 5-6 package installations? i'm trying to install openssh-client and openssh_server but I always get an error at some point. i have tried both pandora-squeeze 1.0.5 and 1.0.6 (xopher's version). should i try another SD card or is installing stuff really that bad for the FS? has anyone else tried installing ssh?
Click to expand...

Of course, it's not normal.
I got some errors after my first installation on a Transcend 32GB class 10, but nothing happened since my second -- ouf.
Looking on the net at that time, I learned that some cards, even when from a well-known brand, had some trouble because of incompatibility with some card readers. For example, I have another card, 4GB microSD, that I can only use with a USB card reader, and not in the machine's one.
Useless to try e2fsck. Reformat and reinstall everything, and hope for it to work properly after.
 
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