Debian on SD

[Stuckie]

Effectively a repost from the other boards; so feel free to read the whole thing for what's been going on: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/57097-debian-on-an-sd-card/


Thanks to chris_c for being the guinea pig and testing a few times.. specially with my script fail


Be sure to untar while preserving permissions! (IE: sudo tar -xvjpf pandora-squeeze-1.0.tar.bz2 -C /my/ext2-formatted/sdcard )


--edit-- link removed, latest releases on wiki page - http://pandorawiki.org/index.php?title=Debian_On_SD


This has the following configured:


Wifi


Nubs


Touchscreen


Keymap


Partially configured is the PND system.. you can run PNDs, but not sure it auto detects them, and it certainly doesn't seem to stuff them in LXDE's menu for some reason.. needs some fiddling I think. ( Though chris_c informs me that debian-menu.xml doesn't exist for LXDE, so that's probably what's causing LXDE's menu to go mad, and may be why the PNDs don't seem to show up.. )


Known oddities:


Wifi led lights up when you start it the first time.. doesn't light up the second time but is active.


Bluetooth led comes on.. doesn't quite seem to be configured.


Xorg can sometimes peg the CPU to 100% for no reason -- though this seems to be libts related...


Console cursor can appear in the top left for no reason as well.


Default user is:


username: pandora


password: debian


There is no root password.. use sudo passwd to set it if needed.


Enjoy

 

[TrashyMG]

Going to give it a whirl.. my attempt at Fedora arm resulted in it just freezing when attempting to load kernel.


Also your link on seems broken.. had to go the gp2x site to get a proper link.

 

[Stuckie]

Oops.. should be fixed now.. I thought I copied the message source too!


Not that there's any difference between how the link looks, which is probably what threw me off... why it mangles urls I have no idea, really stupid forum thing.


Anyway, I'm currently going through the process again and documenting it on the Wiki for prosperity, and to clean it up a bit ( there are a few vicious hacks in there... ) so if you catch any other oddities that I haven't seen yet, gimme a shout

 

[TrashyMG]

Not sure if it's my SD card, but I'm getting an unable to load Kernal image it finds the file. but It's complaining it failed ext2 load and says there is CRC issue with the uImage file.. I formatted the card specifically to ext2 and used the exact commands specified above to extract it.

 

[Stuckie]

That sounds like a flakey uboot as I had that issue till I reflashed.


So, you have two choices:


Update/Reflash uboot to a non-flakey version.


Repartition your card into a small ( ~50mb ) fat32 partition at the front, and the ext2/3 partition covering the rest of it.


Stick uImage in the fat32 partition.


Redo the boot.txt something like this:

setenv bootargs debug root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootdelay=2 console=ttyS0,115200n8 vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K

fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage

bootm 0x80300000

I had to do that originally as well till I upgraded to HF4.


Note: You'd get the same issue if you booted an Angstrom rootfs as well, it's not just an issue confined to my Debian rootfs.

 

[TrashyMG]

That sounds like a flakey uboot as I had that issue till I reflashed.


So, you have two choices:


Update/Reflash uboot to a non-flakey version.


Repartition your card into a small ( ~50mb ) fat32 partition at the front, and the ext2/3 partition covering the rest of it.


Stick uImage in the fat32 partition.


Redo the boot.txt something like this:

setenv bootargs debug root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootdelay=2 console=ttyS0,115200n8 vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K

fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage

bootm 0x80300000

I had to do that originally as well till I upgraded to HF4.


Note: You'd get the same issue if you booted an Angstrom rootfs as well, it's not just an issue confined to my Debian rootfs.

I been pushing off updating to HF4.. perhaps I'll give that a try.

 

[TrashyMG]

Update: looks like I had HF4 already... but partitioning like you said did the trick. Awesome job.


Or Maybe I do only have HF3... well it's working..

 

[Stuckie]

Good stuff


I've been retracing my steps again and documenting it on the Wiki as well at the moment ( http://pandorawiki.org/Debian_On_SD ) .. hopefully get a slightly cleaner build, for instance.


The thread on the other board has had some activity with people getting it working too - scary notion having people actually use my dodgy hacks


--edit--


I've just released 1.0.1 ... this is exactly what the guide on the Wiki shows how to do, and the files can be grabbed from there.


I'll only put new releases on the wiki page now, so I can keep tabs on where all the links are!


Still a few hiccups to deal with:


PNDs don't seem to automatically appear on desktop/menu unless pndnotify is given a manual kicking.


The filebrowser gets littered with old loop mounts for some reason.


Bluetooth is still completely untested.


libts still causes X to chew up process time.


Most PNDs probably still wont run due to library differences.. going to have to figure out a way to sort that one out.


Fixes:


PNDs should actually run properly ( the few that do! like the scripts, etc.. )


PNDs do actually appear where they're supposed to when pndnotify is kicked.


Lots of stuff stripped out; this included synaptic to keep the size down, so you'll need to install that yourself if you want it - see the wiki page for details.


If people are going to use this and want me to continue, I think the next release will be done "properly" IE: Pandora specifics will be in installable debs for ease of maintenance and upgrading alongside mainline.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Oops.. should be fixed now.. I thought I copied the message source too!


Not that there's any difference between how the link looks, which is probably what threw me off... why it mangles urls I have no idea, really stupid forum thing.


Anyway, I'm currently going through the process again and documenting it on the Wiki for prosperity, and to clean it up a bit ( there are a few vicious hacks in there... ) so if you catch any other oddities that I haven't seen yet, gimme a shout

Don;t you mean for posterity?

 

[Stuckie]

Errr yea, something like that


Amusing that it's been wrong for a while and someone only just corrected me!


Anyway, 1.0.3 is released now and should be pretty stable and complete for the most part.


It's the last "brute force" version I'll be doing ( unless something hideous shows up as a bug report. )


The next one will be done "properly" with compiled patches from the Pandora overlay and a Pandora specific repo to pull them in as deb files for maintenance purposes.

 

[ToastBucket]

I installed using 1.0.3, but I can't seem to get anything other than LXDE working. I've tried the other preinstalled sessions and they all just load up LXDE. I installed fluxbox, but it also just loads up LXDE XORG won't even install.

 

[Stuckie]

Preinstalled sessions?


There's nothing but LXDE on there... SLIM is just being confusing and saying other things are there and I hadn't really bothered much to go and figure out how to remove them.


Also, xorg is there and installed - it IS the X server!


I did push this out a bit too quick though as I was short on time to thoroughly test it, and these hacked up releases are only really meant as base images to test things out to see what works and what doesn't, before I start doing everything properly... there's much more discussion on the other boards about this: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/57097-debian-on-an-sd-card/


At the moment, I'm thinking on doing another "final" hacky release this weekend.. so if you find any niggles, please post them in the other thread so I can see them all in the one place and can fix them.

 

[mindlord]

I finally got around to setting this up last night, and got to tinker with it for a bit today. I've noticed a few oddities. Is it me or is SD access slower in this environment than Ångström? Can you think of any reason why audio and video playback with the debain VLC would be significantly slower/more CPU intensive than the Ångström repo version?

 

[Stuckie]

Debian stuff is compiled to ARM4 whereas our Angstrom stuff will be ARM7 .. so it's more generic in Debian.


Shouldn't really be that horrifically slow though.. try running Angstrom from SD card and do the same thing - it might be a bug in the SD I/O stuff, for example.


If I find some time, I'll have a look at it later and see if it's something I've done.. but if you could run it from Angstrom on an SD card and see if it does the same, that'd be great Might as well cover all the bases!

 

[mindlord]

I am using the exact same card as I was using for Angstrom yesterday using VLC from angstrom vs. debian repo playing the same video file. The difference is obvious and noticable.

 

[Stuckie]

Ok, I'll have a look when I get some time.. in the final stages of our project at work so time is a bit thin at the moment..

 

[Stuckie]

Testing this with Big Buck Bunny ( the IPod 5G 320×180, 62 MB version. )


I have modified the 1.0.3 release in the following ways though:


I installed the full lxde ( just do apt-get install lxde )


I installed x11-xserver-tools ( as I forgot xmodmap so your keybindings will be iffy )


I installed mplayer first, then gnome-mplayer.


Under Angstrom (HF4) on boot SD, it seems to run fine - be the file on the OS card or another card.


Under Debian though, it's quite unhappy...


Looking at top, I thought it's a swap issue, so I activated 512mb of swap; sadly this didn't help.


It looks like it's hammering the I/O system for whatever reason.


All tests were carried out with WiFi enabled.


I'll have a look at my earlier versions to see if it was something I missed or cocked up in the later ones.


However, if you get there before me, please post your findings

 

[mindlord]

It looks like it's hammering the I/O system for whatever reason.


All tests were carried out with WiFi enabled.


I'll have a look at my earlier versions to see if it was something I missed or cocked up in the later ones.


However, if you get there before me, please post your findings

Yeah the I/O system in general seems to be sluggish. I notice a big difference even loading MP3's in any media player. Microseconds instead of milliseconds sluggish. If I get a free moment I'll try to do some digging for you. Maybe the logs will indicate something off.

 

[Stuckie]

I'll be doing a rather major update to the guide soon, along with the release of a new batch of rootfs images. ( yes, images, plural.. )


I've got Emdebian's Grip distribution running properly now... this is good as it cuts out a huge amount of cruft for the majority of the "main" repo packages. It also uses multistrap by default, which is particularly handy for when I get onto 1.1, as I can just add my own repo in and pull from that, as well as Grip's and stock Debian, and multistrap will deal with all the permission stuff automatically - and it's stupidly fast, as I was doing rather large rootfs installs on my Pandora in about an hour.


Because it cut so much stuff out, I actually got it shrunk enough to attempt something utterly insane - running Debian from NAND.


Not only could I get it running from NAND, but out of the 475Mb that you get, it only used about 100-odd on the NAND for the system, and this included LXDE and GDM!


Of course, installing Debian to NAND is for absolute lunatics just now, seeing as I've not exactly got it 100% bug free or anything, but it's now possible


I shall be providing a new Grip rootfs tomorrow with LXDE. This will be the final, honestly, no more, completely last release of the current 1.0 set... the next one will be 1.1; especially as I now have multistrap working properly.


I shall also be testing the file I/O to see if it goes mad when attempting to play a video. I suspect it might, and it'll hopefully be fixed when I deal with building a new kernel and so on... will update with the results anyway.


-edit-


The current e16 image I'm building has no issues playing the Big Buck Bunny file... granted I haven't finished setting up the entire image yet, but it's promising at least... I must've buggered something up somewhere along the line.


I was going to provide an e16 rootfs, but after some extended usage, it'll probably confuse people a great deal..

 

[Stuckie]

New (final) release!


1.0.4 .. based on Emdebian Grip, which makes it slightly smaller and slightly faster again.


This comes with iceweasel ( firefox, ) synaptic, gnome-mplayer, lxde, and the usual stuff.


The PND system seems to work fine in this release - obviously libraries aren't all in place to run most of them, but the actual system itself seems to be fine.


Mplayer doesn't seem to thrash I/O either when playing videos, which 1.0.3 seemed to do.


Again, short of VICIOUS bugs, this is the last one till 1.1


Download here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/apps/pandora/Debian/pandora-squeeze-1.0.4-grip.tar.bz2