Easy Devuan J720 install from disk image!!

joval - 2021-09-11 8:27 AM

Hi All!

Thanks for the pointers on keymaps, etc... will test and include in future images... with kbd package. Reminder on stock J720 with 32MB ROM the "apt" installer doesn't have enough memory to work, very slow and fails (at least in fluxbox image...). Timo's qemu emulator works great on RasPi and will install what you want.

[Snip....]

Mark...

I just tried the aironet 350(with WPA firmware upgrade) and noticed it responds to connmanctl enable/disable wifi, scan wifi, services and tries to connect (but fails)... so there is hope (ironic, now that I sent you the Linksys wifi card with WPA firmware upgrade), if someone knows how to install the Cisco ACU app which appears necessary for connection, it might be the solution. Stefan, thanks again, for including the aironet drivers!

Best regards,

Joval

joval - 2021-09-11 9:29 AM

Timo,

Did my hosted image(s) boot up and function properly with your 128 ROM board? ArchiMark had some protracted difficulties until he remembered the special 128 bootloader... which is necessary because Stefan had to change the location of the kernel ( to avoid/simplify/fix conflicts).
Thanks in advance.

All others,

If you are using/burning your downloaded image to an SD or microSD card Do Not buy the RED SD card to CF card adapter $12 on Amazon or Ebay They are "junk" as the last 3 that I purchased did not work, and ArchiMark had 2 that failed!! That's 5 out 5 recently,( vs "only" 30% that failed last year)! I recommend the better quality black "Digigear" brand for several dollars more. They will spare you from hours of wasted time and frustration, IMO. ArchiMark will agree!

Joval

timob0 - 2021-09-11 11:46 AM

Hi Joval, yes the image booted on the 128m Jornada straight away with mem=32m in params.txt
When I changed it to 128m it got a kernel panic until I found and used the modified bootloader from Stefans page.

-timo

joval - 2021-09-12 1:27 AM

Yes, I finally concluded using gparted (on RasPi 3 or 4 ) to resize the ext2 partition worked best, easiest using a tar image of the ext2 devuan partition... so the larger images have same size Fat32 (which I enlarged to about 12GB so WinCe had plenty of room for files downloaded in Devuan mode, also save WinCE backup file(s) here for dual boot. I divided the disk into about 40% Fat32 and 60% Devuan on smaller images, with majority of disk >80% devuan on larger images(as I recall). Enjoy!

C:Amie - 2021-09-11 9:46 AM

You mean this?

stingraze - 2021-09-11 4:50 PM


Yeah, I know you were using Raspberry Pi 3 / 4 for gparted. What I meant was maybe you can get gparted / parted working on the Jornada 720 Linux and gparted / parted in the Jornada 720 itself.

Source for parted etc.:
https://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

When I have time, I will try to boot your Linux image on my Japanese Jornada 720.

-stingraze

timob0 - 2021-09-10 4:03 AM

Hi Joval,

thank you very much, this is really excellent work! I just downloaded the 64GB variant and dd'ed it to my compact flash card and soon after that I'm in business. Couldn't be easier :-)

Quick question: Did the keymaps I shared earlier make it into the image? Didn't see them at first glance, no problem if not; can copy them quickly

On another note, do I need a different jlinexec for the 128mb modded machine? When I set mem=128 in the params.txt it wouldn't boot claiming it can't find the root drive

Thanks again
Timo

joval - 2021-09-12 11:41 PM



C:Amie: Yes, thanks, that's what I'm currently using... much better build quality and no defective ones to date.

So, are you going to try out one of the Devuan images?

Best,

Joval

(dang-nabbit... another small fire just north of us, but wind blowing away from us so OK, they're snuffing it out now)

timob0 - 2021-09-13 3:26 AM

Hi Joval,

I can confirm the "DevJ7_31Gb_AutoIceWM_WPA_VNC_RS.zip" (date Sept 11) image does work. I added the 128M bootloader and set mem=128m, works without issues. I use a Transcend 64GB CF card and a USB/IDE/CF-Adapter contraption to "burn" the image. In case you are on Linux, unzip and dd can be piped together so you don't need to decompress the image if you're tight on diskspace:

unzip -p | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M progress=status 

replace sdX with the memory card device -- BE CAREFUL - dd just dumps data where you tell it to.

Once burned, I added the following packages to the card using QEMU on the desktop:

 

apt-get install kbd 

apt-get install gparted 

apt-get install whiptail 

Then booted the card on the Jornada and resized the root partition to use the full 64GB capacity. The gparted package contains the commandline "parted" which I used:

Login as root, then do

swapoff -a                          -- turns off swap 

parted                              -- launches the partition editor 

 

In parted, do: 

unit MB                             -- switches to megabyte display 

print                               -- shows the partition table 

rm 3                                -- deletes swap partition 

resizepart 2 -256M                  -- resizes the 2nd partition to the cards  

                                    -- capacity minus 256M 

mkpart primary linux-swap -256 -0   -- creates swap in the last 256MB of the card 

quit                                -- leave parted 

 

mkswap /dev/hda3                    -- creates the swap filesystem 

swapon -a                           -- turn swapping on 

 

resize2fs /dev/hda2                 -- resizes the filesystem to the new capacity of hda2 

 

df -BM                              -- convince yourself of the new sizes 

The parted commands take a few seconds to execute on the Jornada, the only bit taking maybe 3-4 minutes is the resize2fs command which does the actual filesystem modification.
So I think with this you could resort to creating an image with minimal needed size, maybe 8GB is enough? If you include gparted, people can resize to the capacity of their cards and spare you the work of hosting multiple images.
To make this easier, my suggestion would be to change the order of partitions from current:

DOS, root, swap

to

DOS, swap, root

because then the steps of removing and re-creating swap are not needed.

Also I have another suggestion which is due to my personal preference of working on the commandline: Make the startx part optional. Not sure how that's done, maybe its a rc script?

I'm currently investigating how to put together something like raspi-config for the jornada (that's what the whiptail package is for). First I'd work on the filesystem resizing and adding a customer user as that's covered in the raspi-config already and should be easy to adapt.

Kind regards
Timo

joval - 2021-09-12 3:41 PM



C:Amie: Yes, thanks, that's what I'm currently using... much better build quality and no defective ones to date.

So, are you going to try out one of the Devuan images?

Best,

Joval

(dang-nabbit... another small fire just north of us, but wind blowing away from us so OK, they're snuffing it out now)

joval - 2021-09-12 4:01 PM


[Snip....]


Sorry, the Menu is a bit messy and lacks entry for "xapm" that monitors battery, and "scrot" screen capture to name 2. Any clues on how to set that up (Mark?) or clean it up... welcomed.

Thanks guys!

Joval

 
$ cd /home/user  

$ ls -al  (see if there's a '.icewm file there, if so, do: 

# nano .icewm