Re: zaurus-debian success!

[steve <steve@mumze.com>]

Klaus Weidner wrote:

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 01:37:05AM -0700, steve wrote:
  

(my old e-mail is descentlvr<at>hotmail dot com, I've posted before)
First off, Klaus Weidner is The Man.
    

Thanks :-)

  

Since I love tab completion so much I set up SSH daemons on each OS 
(Sharp ROM and zaurus-debian), plus I can connect from a desktop.
debshrink works VERY well, saving tons of space (15megs just from 
shrinking, not to mention deleting downloaded .debs).
    

It largely removes internationalization information. Note that the "base"
image has this run already to save space, but I don't do it for the "big"
one by default.

  

I will continue explaining my zaurus-debian experience later this week.  
I've had this up and running for a few days.  I've just been 
installing/removing packages and gettin' used to it.
    

Yes, I'd be curious to hear how it's working out. Power management is a
mess right now due to the differences between ROMs - is that working for
you? I need to spend some time on this, which I don't have right now :-(

-Klaus

  

"{Mouse buttons}
    Toggle between 1-button
    mode and 3-button emulation.
    Same as [Action]-[Contacts]."
For me, Action-Calendar toggles this, not Action-Contacts.  I think this is what you meant because later:
"[Action]-[Calendar]
    Toggle between 1-button
    and 3-button emulation
    mouse mode (see below)"

"[Calendar]
    <Control> modifier"
Calendar does not work as ctrl for me, which reminds me: do you know what works as ctrl in the text console?  Fn+Shift doesn't work like it does in Qtopia, and I'm tired of switching to "Replace Battery" and rebooting my Z just because I pinged something while in the text console :-)

Do you know the Sharp ROM terminal command for bringing up the network, or what is run at startup (after a reboot) that starts CF network cards?  I can run "cardctl eject" to eject, say, my wired NIC, and when I put my wireless card in, I don't know how to restart the network stuff.  "dhcpcd" and "ifup eth0" don't work because eth0 isn't detected.  "cardctl insert" works with no errors, but "dhcpcd" doesn't start anything after that.  "cardctl status" shows my card as suspended, "cardctl ident" correctly identifies my card. 
Just so you know, after Fbvnc'ing into debian-zaurus, I've been doing "mount -t proc none /proc"

How simple would it be for me to make it so Rotate rotates the screen clockwise instead of counterclockwise?  My IR port is on the left side and I'm about to try to get a pocketop IR driver to work.

What kind of environment are you developing in?  Do you cross-compile from your linux desktop?

Power management - the only thing that worked was when my battery got low and it automatically dimmed the backlight, which was nice.  Attempted manual changing of brightness as well as suspending does not work.

apt-get/dpkg RAM shortage - this is actually a pretty huge inconvenience, unfortunately, since the 5600 only has 32megs of RAM.  I can only "apt-get install <pkg>" if I exit Qtopia and don't start Vncserver/Xvnc, so I can't be in zaurus-debian and apt-get anything or dpkg -i anything.  "apt-get update" works fine but dpkg takes up too much RAM to use.  (dmesg revealed I ran out of memory) Here's the output from "df -h" from the Sharp ROM:

Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 22.0M    21.3M    768.0k  97% /
/dev/ram1                44.0k     26.0k     18.0k  59% /dev
/dev/mtdblock3      35.0M     7.2M     27.8M  21% /home
none                         1.0M    960.0k     64.0k  94% /dev/shm
/dev/mmcda          236.3M   178.2M   45.8M  80% /usr/mnt.rom/card

As you can see I have extra space on /dev/mtdblock3.  Do you think it would be fast enough to run from here?  I'd like to make a 24mb swap file.  I'd have tried this already, but I don't know how to make a swap file on  /dev/mtdblock3 so that zaurus-debian can see it, do you?  I believe I could shrink /home via resize2fs and mount the remaining space on /mnt/card/debroot/swap from the Sharp ROM, then do "swapon" from zaurus-debian, or something similar.  Do you think it's safe to resize, and would this work?

Does the IceWM configuration on -base-v0.17 take up less RAM than -big-?  Also I would not be opposed to trying an even lighter weight wm (I use the minimalistic pekwm with everything hot-keyed so I'm not worried about "user-friendliness," especially while trying to conserve RAM on a PDA.)   Any way you can think of that would let me be able to use dpkg and apt-get from debian-zaurus would be great.

Steve