Please help me boot Debian from SD


Network manager seems to be working.  I installed it, then took eth0 out of /etc/network/interfaces, then restarted network manager.  Ethernet started right away upon plugging the cable in.  Nice.

Up next:  It would be nice to enable power-saving as in angstrom.
 
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Network manager seems to be working.  I installed it, then took eth0 out of /etc/network/interfaces, then restarted network manager.  Ethernet started right away upon plugging the cable in.  Nice.

Up next:  It would be nice to enable power-saving as in angstrom.
Ah yes, the powersaving. Well, that's where I'm stuck currently, but don't have time to try to solve it. If you manage to solve it, I would appreciate if you could describe your solution here.
 
Here is my setup for mounting various elements of the system. With this, I have managed to reduce the overall usage of the RAM, and KDE works better.

/etc/fstab:


rootfs / auto defaults,noatime 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/volatile tmpfs defaults,size=1% 0 0
tmpfs /run/shm tmpfs mode=0777 0 0
/dev/mmcblk1p2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p2 swap swap defaults 0 0

By default, I have swap partitions on both SD cards, so that I can always have swap, regardless of how many SD cards I have in pandora - see the swapon/swapoff utils for details on managing swap.

/etc/default/tmpfs:


RAMLOCK=no
RAMSHM=no
TMPFS_SIZE=1%VM
RUN_SIZE=1%
LOCK_SIZE=26214400 # 2.5MiB
SHM_SIZE=1%
TMP_SIZE=1%

I have 1GHz pandora with 512 MB RAM, and with this setup, I have managed to keep the RAM usage to around 300-400 MB and that is while running KDE, postgresql, apache, and several firefox and terminal windows, and development instance of django. So far, I haven't seen more than 50 - 100 MB of swap usage. I have copied the scripts from pandora that do the setup, because I still haven't had time to check all of them and clean them from the stuff I don't need, but I have disabled zram because I don't need it.

System is very responsive and usable. And of course, the parameters depend on what you do.

I'm using KDE because I'm toying with KDE and python, but I guess that for XFCE and some other lightweight X managers the RAM usage would be even less.
 
Ah yes, the powersaving. Well, that's where I'm stuck currently, but don't have time to try to solve it. If you manage to solve it, I would appreciate if you could describe your solution here.
It's not pretty, but I inserted the suspend_ function found in /usr/pandora/scripts/op_power.sh into pm-suspend.  I am using fluxbox with xfce4-power-manager running.    Now the pandora seems to be holding power over periods when the lid is closed.

1.  edit  /usr/pandora/scripts/op_power.sh  such that the pvrsrvkm test is not done (add the # signs)


#if lsof -t /dev/pvrsrvkm > /dev/null; then
# return 1
#fi

2.  copy /usr/sbin/pm-suspend to /usr/sbin/pm-suspend.bak or some such so you can backtrack if needed.  Then change /usr/sbin/pm-suspend to


#/bin/sh
. /usr/pandora/scripts/op_power.sh
suspend_

(include the period, space beginning the second line, and the underscore ending the third.  I know this is really editing some linked files.  Ok.)

It's a little buggy but it gets me through the day.  For some reason I lose the capability to go between screens (ctr-alt-arrow etc) for a little time after starting it up.  But after a while it seems to kick in and I get all four screens.  EDIT:  this is no longer an issue.
 
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