Re: Thinking abt installing intimate, but have some generic questions

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 09:06 -0600, Analabha Roy wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have an IPAQ H3650 in which I have been running familiar 0.7.2
> for some time. Since I'm running out of space in my flash, and I
> require SSL supported browsers/email clients and stuff for my wireless
> internet (the familiar installation for the above are really messy and
> packages are buggy and broken) , I'm thinking of trying out Intimate.
> I have a pcmcia expansion sleeve and have linked up my Ambicom
> wirleless card (which works on familiar with the "hostap_cs" driver,
> although I tested it on my friend's laptop in knoppix, and there it
> ran on the "orinico_cs" driver, which failed to run the card in
> familiar, go figure). I have a 256 mb compactflash card and a
> CF-pcmcia adapter (it works in familiar) . I have a few questions and
> I was hoping you guys could enlighten me.

I am working on using the debootstrap to install intimate on my ipaq.
This is straight from debian so no rsync etc is required. I have
attached what I have done *so far* which is not complete (its dowloading
packages as I write this, and I know that X will not be properly
configured and maybe some other problems.

Additionally I have not yet built the debs for the kernel and modules (I
plan to do that soon) but it may be a better way if you dont want to use
beta_installer from the scripts that is on intimate.handhelds.org (rsync
is up and working though, if you use the installer it will install and
on a 3600 should work perfectly).

As for kde, think about memory usage, and storage space. KDE is not
that friendly to systems with low memory and low storage space. Swap is
also important, if you have only a 256M flash card you may find that
once you take some out for swap (if the system runs out of memory it can
crash, and usually will) you have even less for a file system.

You may do better with matchbox (blackbox more or less designed for
smaller systems). Unless of course you need KDE for something specific.

The *base* install of debian is 95M but that is a bare minimum install
odds are you will want extras like sshd, X etc. That is going to take
more space. There is a tiny-x server for 3600 series on
intimate.handhelds.org iirc (I have a h5500 so I dont pay attention much
to things that do not work for my hardware easily).

The beta installer can be found off the intimate webpage, and may be the
easier route for you right now (once installed apt-get dist-upgrade
brings debian current, so dont worry too much that its older).. I had
to tweak the script a bit becuase I installed on a SD card, and the
script is pretty set for CF but its a bourne shell script so its fairly
trivial to edit.

As for my debian solution WHICH IS NOT FINISHED AND IS LIKELY TO BREAK
AT THIS POINT see below. These are notes for now, not a ready to run
script, I dont want to clean it up to make this easy to do without
reading it and understanding it a little because its not finished, not
well tested, not ... Use with care, you have been warned.

# first make the filesystem
# -j instructs to make a journal which means ext3 in reality
# dont forget swap (mkswapfs) or if needed to partition it with
# fdisk or ...
mkfs.ext2 -j /dev/hda1
# assuming a good entry in /etc/fstab
mount /mnt/card

#
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?searchon=names&version=all&exact=1&keywords=debootstrap
# for updated listings I used 'woody' or stable

# INSTALL-PATH is /mnt/hda1 or /mnt/mmc or nfs or ...
mkdir INSTALL-PATH/debinst-tmp
cd INSTALL-PATH/debinst-tmp

# unstable (sarge) and testing (sid) use the same debootstrap
#
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_0.2.45_arm.deb

wget
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_0.1.17.7woody1_arm.deb

ar -xf debootstrap_0.1.17.7woody1_arm.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz -C ..
cd ..
DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR=`pwd`/usr/lib/debootstrap usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch
arm woody `pwd` \
http://http.us.debian.org/debian

# if familiar, we can use the existing configs
cp /etc/fstab INSTALL-ROOT/etc/fstab
cp /etc/network/interfaces INSTALL-ROOT/etc/network/interfaces
cp /etc/hostname INSTALL-ROOT/etc/hostname
rm INSTALL-ROOT/etc/resolv.conf # its a link
cp /etc/resolv.conf INSTALL-ROOT/etc/resolv.conf

# configure keyboard
chroot INSTALL-ROOT
dpkg-reconfigure console-data

/usr/sbin/base-config

This is where I am at now. The download is taking forever (slow link)
and writes are slow too since I am doing this via NFS to try to give
myself an easy way to undo this without reformatting etc. I may make a
*base* image (upto but not including the base-config which will be done
on first boot) to make it even easier for people in the future. Upon
completion I was planning on posting to the mailing list for anyone
interested.

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com