A Call for Help: Debian.

Argh, some annoying glitches are going on...

I still have not managed to replace the default keymap with one that fully supports the 720, and I am not being notified of new email.

I now see just how bad apt was - I ran an apt-get update, and a df right after told me that 31 extra mb had been consumed.

Also, I finally figured out how to change that annoying Debian message at login to my own (/etc/motd), and to display properly with fortune, but I might end up going the Slackware way, and just have fortune display.

I have a few more programs that I am looking for before I can complete this release of console edition, and those would be a dictionary (cmonex's fault... anyways a console dictionary would be more efficient than a GUI one), some sort of PIM (there must be tons of it somewhere), getting a newsreader running (apparently installing it isn't enough ), an rtf editor, and some cool stuff.

If you want to suggest a package, NOW is the time. I would like to hear input from anyone looking forward to the release, as far as package suggestions....or just suggestions. The whole point of this project is to make the best Linux release possible for the 720, which means getting everyones needs while maintaining a small size.

I was thinking of having a small GUI distribution, with just the graphics and little console tools. But I am probably going to leave that to Jlime, because if you want minimal, thats the way to go. So when I complete the GUI release (after the console release...when you have a cf card you have to do things cumulatively), it will contain the FULL console release and over 100mb of GUI software. If you want to suggest GUI programs as well, PM me or post.

As far as GUI itself, considering that GPE was never considered stable, I do not think that it will surprise anyone that I am going with OPIE, which Familiar claimed to be beautiful with excellent PIM. Matchbox will definitely be on there, along with any other light WM's if I see necessary. Once I can get the xserver to actually do something other than showing an X on the screen (and kernel 2.6 is stable) , I will look into those little desktop things that display information about the system (or swim around).

Argh. Ok, if someone makes a keymap for a 720, they must take into account that not everyone has a European keyboard layout!!! The / key is doing all kinds of crazy things, sometimes acting like alt-gr (yay..accents....) to...clearing the entire line? FN is not doing anything, alt is not either, pretty much - the only improvement I see is that the delete key moves backwards.

Ok, I spent way to much time editing that keymap, but now every FN and ALT key works on the US 720's, except for the Pound and Euro sign...but this is the US layout, right?

Numlock seems to work, but I am not sure how to set the keys to their numbers when it is enabled. But the most important thing is that pgup and pgdown work (for the long lists that accumulate on such a small screen)

I will release it for download later, but will try to get the numlock working first.

As far as the hard buttons on the screen, I should be able to map those when X is running. Same with the Function keys, so that they will work similarly to the way they did in CE.

How did I get the FN key to work? Why, by just calling it the AltGr, and saying that if I press it and p, the left brace will display, and so on. AltGr does not seem to work otherwise...heheh

Oh, and I just installed 46mb of console games for no apparent reason. They really are only 10mb of software at the most, but a few use dictionaries. I will see if I can use those libraries for other uses, and if not, those few games will be deleted. Some are quite fun! I guess that is what should be expected after you go through a few hundred on a very long list...

What could I say? Excellent work PS! I'm looking forward your releases.

About package suggestion, a great handicap on the Windows CE 3.0 of the Jornada 720, is that there is no VPN PPTP client (there are just IPsec clients). VPN PPTP support is mandatory for networking, and Linux on Jornada looks like the only way to get it working. There is an opensource VPN PPTP client for Linux at [url]http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/, that of course, have his ARM binary ready for use in the Debian repository.

Just continue your work as you have done until now!

Lol, I was worried for a minute there that I was going to have to find a client myself.

Thank you very much for the link, no less an ARM binary! I will definitely look into this.

The 45mb of text games turned out to be a dependency on Perl, which is 20mb. It was installed with the 12mb documentation.

Well, I kind of DELETED! Perl, found and deleted the TWO games that relied on it (will everyone miss hangman?), went through the dpkg system, and deleted the lines that stated it was installed. Apt was annoyed that it did not have Perl installed, as it was a dependency. By doing this, I cheated the system, and as far as Debian knows - bsdgames was never installed and does not exist on the system.


So now I have a bunch of cool stuff installed, and when I delete all the Apt lists, it be just over 100mb. So I am still looking into more stuff to add. Maybe I can find console PIM in the form of a database program, I will search around for that. I am looking forward to more package suggestions.

Ok, I installed the VPN client that you linked to. It seems to require ppp (which I installed). But as there is currently no support for the 720 modem, you would need a pcmcia one to use this... (Then again - these days, if you need to use a modem, there is no need for a network card in the pcmcia slot...

Am I missing something? Are there VPN clients that connect over other means?

-Not my specialty.

yes there are VPN clients that are able to connect over networks. try to find such a client.

Never mind, ppp was just an extension. It says something about going through isdn and others, so it should be fine.

I forgot to mention a few very cool things that I have stumbled upon. One, directvnc, is actually a CONSOLE VNC client!!! Next, I found a real treat for the console release: A text window manager! Called twin, I have been able to start it, but as I still have not properly set up the touchscreen, I cannot do anything. As far as console PIM, I found a cool program, hnb, that is a note/database program. It can do a lot of things, from storing contacts, to bookmarks, to notes, to...whatever you want. I did find a contact program to, and I am checking it out. I found a console todo program, but it seems to have a large learning curve - although I did hear something about a program called reminder. Supposedly it would work with the calendar program to display important dates. So it seems that the console already had built in PIM...

Ok, something happened while I was writing this. I looked through all the programs that started with f, and in there was a mysterious script called fix_bs_and_del. It just shows you how other people's work can build up unknown in this operating system. I ran it, and the delete key still acted like backspace. But when I opened it, this turned out to be it using the wrong keycode for this layout. Of course, the program does not matter now, because I changed the keymap to set the delete key to the remove command, reloaded it, and now the delete key works properly! So the keyboard is very functional now, with only the pound and euro not working. I found some program to install these to the console, but with 8mb of dependencies (or was it 18), I think console version will do without, unless if I find something better (or a way to cheat the dependencies ). Numlock does not yet work either, that can't be too hard to fix.

And..I forgot the other thing that I wanted to say.

Some interesting news. I found an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) that is about 1/11th the size of the current one. The bad news is that it doesn't work.

I'll probably figure it out. Anyways, the REAL interesting news is that I got twin to work! I set the Windows key as Pause , so now it pops open the twin menus. With the keyboard you can do everything, including moving/resizing windows. I will look into the touchscreen sometime, but if everyone hasn't realized yet, console edition needs to be completed first. So I am still waiting on the kernel before I even start on the X edition.

Oh yeah, and I renamed the distribution, (which it now is) to J-720 Linux. The current revision is 1.1, and when it is completed (and released as a non-beta), it will be at version 2.0. At this point I am pulling it away from Debian. In the end, apt-get and the dpkg system will still be installed, but you will have to run an apt-get update first to use it. The main installation tool would be ipkg. Although, the whole point of this distribution is to get everything that anyone here could possibly need (and want ), into one download, so there should not be much need to add stuff on. Believe me, I am cramming a ton into this system. I even went through the individual binaries and deleted unnecessary ones.

As I just hinted, 1.1 will be released as a beta shortly. This is only console edition.

I am also experimenting with tools that would let you connect to the internet with an irda-enabled cell phone. There is lots of Nokia support, and I installed a program for gsm phones. As I do not have one of these, this will be part of the purpose of the beta release. It is hard to judge a system if you cannot use it.

Things are getting much closer to where they should be. Who knows, maybe we will have a completed Linux distribution for our 720's by the holidays.

Ok, I just found a Euro character (and maybe a pound) on the default keymap. Now I just need to figure out how to address it.

As far as PIM, contact management is now excellent. Abook is a great program that is also made to interface with mutt, an emailer, which is a plus. SlPIM is also a nice program, you just need to type a when you start it to get into the main app (no idea why, but it is fine otherwise). And I forgot the fact that Pine has its own simple, but built in contact management. (Very simple, only good for email. These other programs store notes). And, as before, hnb is just awesome.

So all that is left for PIM is todo management.

I have been a bit curious about the alarm light. It is not part of the keyboard (no scancode), so how could it be controlled? Perhaps I will ask this in an appropriate thread. Same would go for the multimedia buttons, and the hard buttons. The alarm light could be useful though, such as notifying the user of new email, or (of course) for alarms.

I really want to support everything, maybe even the smart card (or whatever it is) port. There are probably already drivers that would work on it.

A little bit ago, I realized that all a dictionary would need is a little script to search up the word, and display the definition. This is extremely simple (it is!), and I could probably learn how to make such a script. Getting a dictionary would not be a problem, the only thing that may be annoying is that the words would need to be in brackets or something for the definition to work, and I doubt that a dictionary would come that way. So once I get a script that works running, perhaps pieces of the file could be passed out to forum users, who could edit those parts. Who knows, there may be a simpler way of doing things.

I really would like some forum input. Don't make me feel like I am talking to myself.

Eheheh. Shows how dumb Debian can be.

Perl was installed the whole time. Yep, 2 to 3 copies were installed. So I am probably going to delete the copy on there, and get a real working perl going. (I really did not want to remove perl from the system, it is a very useful thing to have, as it makes up a lot of linux scripts). I also found a perl MTA, which I might use. But I am not sure.

As far as the small MTA, it is so old that it doesn't work with the current libraries. I could recompile it, but I really don't want to.

So I am searching for another. I could go the familiar way, and have it use a remote smtp server as its only option, but I will only go to that as a last resort. If I do not find anything, I will just see how much I can shrink Exim, which really is not that big in the first place. But currently I am looking for lighter startup programs, to conserve ram. I would like to get the startup to under 15mb of ram, 10 would be excellent.

I am once again trying to shrink this system even more, and once I get kernel 2.6 running (did something stupid), I will be able to go through every file on that system with much more ease.

Eh. For the MTA, I will use postfix. I had no idea it was so small. It is 2mb, but is an excellent MTA, and is smaller than Exim4 by a tiny bit.

Some advances: I installed tinylogin, a multi-call binary, to replace login, passwd, adduser, and others, in one compact binary. It is working great. Then I installed busybox, which is the equivalent to Debian's 7mb coreutils, but in a single 500kb binary. That's where things go wrong. Some of the programs are too limited to run the init scripts.

So I will manually go through, and replace those few programs with the originals. Then the system will run fine. But it will be a long, slow process. But hey, for the 7+ mb I save, 7+ more mb of software can be installed.

Do not be worried about these smaller applications, they have all the functionality you would need. When I release the beta, make sure to test all the programs, and see if they suit your needs. If not, post or PM me, and I will replace those binaries with the originals. To tell everyone the truth, the only difference I have noticed so far is that to get color ls output, you type ls -c instead of ls --color.

-Do note that because of this long and slow process, I will have to hold the release off for a bit longer.

Thanks for installing it!

That PPTP client do not requiere a dial up connection in order to work, it can work over TCP/IP as well. Of course it needs PPP as you are creatting a tunnel and MPPE support compiled in the kernel if you are going to use encription (I believe that brand new Kernel 2.6.13.4 has it already without patching). I don't mind the modem at all, most connections are done now by ethernet (802.3 or 802.11).

About other basic packages... counting that we are just in text mode, let me list some utils:

* Web Browser: Lynx (obvious, huh?), links2
* IRC client: BitchX
* MSN Messenger client: gtmess
* Archivers: tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar
* File manager: Midnight Commander (also obvious)
* Text editor: JED (MSDOS "edit" like editor with sytanx highlight)
* Various net utils: wget, curl
* Development: full suite of development tools to compile sources for our Jornada :)
* Servers: Samba (omg, this is a heavy one, but if we want our Jornada to share files with Windows-based machines it is needed)

Fortunately, almost every package listed here can be found in the Debian ARM binaries repository.

I'm going to bed, maybe that I suggest more packages as I'm remembering...

I have many text editors installed, and mcedit is similar to DOS edit, but I will look into JED. Isn't that a programming text editor? I remember seeing it on the lists. What I really need, and simply cannot find, is an rtf editor. DOS had msword...linux does not. There must be something similar, from those days when it was only console, or maybe from the unix days. But that is a high priority.

MSN...heheh - I made a little alias to get that working on BitchX with bitlbee, but a real client would be ok too.

Links2 - thanks for reminding me about it, as I was not happy with Links. I will install this. Lol, elinks would not even work.

Curl? I'll check it out.

Development tools....well, this is where I don't know if I can serve you. When you get into development, more libraries, programs, and files IS better. I could not just include a small compiling system and expect most (if any) programs would compile. I will probably release console edition with programming extensions or something, after the inital console edition release.

-Thanks for the input, I am happy to hear it. I take it that you will be a beta tester?

EDIT: gtmess looks EXCELLENT! I will definitely add this to the release. Thanks! You seem to have a good knack at package selections.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2005-10-16 8:59 PM

Well this is inexcusable on the part of whoever maintains the ipkg's, at least whoever compiled busybox. Want to know why the scripts were not working? Because the programs that busybox is supposed to have WERE NOT COMPILED INTO IT! I have a list here of all the programs that it should have (an impressive amount):

addgroup, adduser, adjtimex, ar, arping, ash, awk, basename, bunzip2,
busybox, bzcat, cal, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp,
cp, cpio, crond, crontab, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, delgroup, deluser,
devfsd, df, dirname, dmesg, dos2unix, dpkg, dpkg-deb, du, dumpkmap,
dumpleases, echo, egrep, env, expr, false, fbset, fdflush, fdformat, fdisk,
fgrep, find, fold, free, freeramdisk, fsck.minix, ftpget, ftpput, getopt,
getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, hdparm, head, hexdump, hostid, hostname,
httpd, hush, hwclock, id, ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, inetd, init, insmod,
install, ip, ipaddr, ipcalc, iplink, iproute, iptunnel, kill, killall,
klogd, lash, last, length, linuxrc, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, logger, login,
logname, logread, losetup, ls, lsmod, makedevs, md5sum, mesg, mkdir,
mkfifo, mkfs.minix, mknod, mkswap, mktemp, modprobe, more, mount, msh, mt,
mv, nameif, nc, netstat, nslookup, od, openvt, passwd, patch, pidof, ping,
ping6, pipe_progress, pivot_root, poweroff, printf, ps, pwd, rdate,
readlink, realpath, reboot, renice, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, rpm,
rpm2cpio, run-parts, rx, sed, seq, setkeycodes, sha1sum, sleep, sort,
start-stop-daemon, strings, stty, su, sulogin, swapoff, swapon, sync,
sysctl, syslogd, tail, tar, tee, telnet, telnetd, test, tftp, time, top,
touch, tr, traceroute, true, tty, udhcpc, udhcpd, umount, uname,
uncompress, uniq, unix2dos, unzip, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode,
vconfig, vi, vlock, watch, watchdog, wc, wget, which, who, whoami, xargs,
yes, zcat

In other words, exactly what Debian's coreutils came with. Although, probably only half of these binaries are actually compiled in, if all! Even IPKG could not use the wget installed in busybox! This is a serious mistake by whoever created this ipkg. Stupid mistakes should not happen on a package as important as this.

EDIT: I am compiling it myself.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2005-10-16 11:00 PM