X/qt & Debian With Cacko 1.22, Suscess Story Options

[jerrybme]

Well, I've been futzing around for the last several days with this combo and have gotten it to work very well, so I thought I'd share my experience.

First, while I'm a pdaXrom fan; I want to see if this was the best of both worlds. In many ways it is. The down side is that on a CLXXX machine you're forced to use the slow SD memory for the debian file system so it is slow. Second, if you want to use Wifi, that means using a swapfile on the SD, which raises concerns for what it might do to the memory long term. Since I've got a microdrive, when not surfing the web I use it for swap space. Therefore, this setup makes more sense for the 6000 (assuming a microcard in the CF slot) or 3000 users in that they can keep the debian file system and the swapfile on the faster microdrive.

I found that using the default wm, icewm was not as good as fvwm. It is faster and lighter (important when forced to use the SD). But I am biased as I like the configurability of fvwm, but that means it needs more tweaking and doesn't work "out of the box" as icewm does.

The only adaptations I had to do from the excellent wiki guide was to change the xmodmaprc file.
And alter the startd script that goes in the debian root directory. That solved all of my locales errors that were making some installations fail.

Attached are some screenshots of my setup

Cheers,
Jerry
 shot1.png ( 70.5K ) Number of downloads: 272

 shot2.png ( 70.63K ) Number of downloads: 253

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[wmadan]

Jerry,

Great work! I will have to come back to my PocketWorkstation setup. I got a little frustrated with the locales thingy, so I will try your solutions and let you know how it goes.

If only the clamshell series had internal wifi this would be really a great way to go, microdrive and all. But without the CF wifi card in how would we load and update packages? I've got everything on a 1 GB SD card.

My needs are somewhat simple: I want decent word processing and the ability to use qpdf2, which is so much better in handling pdfs than xpdf in pdaXrom. With my current PocketWorkstation installation, I had Abiword running fine, but I hadn't tackled the keymapping.

If pdaXrom could port qpdf2 over, I would be extremely satisfied to stay on that side of the fence.

But on the other hand, it's sooo fun to have a full debian system running on a Z.

Bill

[jerrybme]

I formatted my Cf micro drive to ext2 to see what I was missing by not having either built-in WiFi or built-in micro drive (wondering if a 3000 or 6000 would be good to get)

The speed up using a micro drive was not as much as I'd expected (or hoped).

Results:
(Without Swap enabled on CF)
Loading X/Qt with Debian on SD ~40 seconds
Loading Firefox on SD ~1 minute 25 seconds

(with CF Swap -64 mb)
Loading X/Qt with Debian on SD ~ 32 seconds
Loading Firefox on SD ~1 minute 20 seconds

(with out Swap on SD)
Loading X/Qt with Debian on CF ~ 30 seconds
Loading Firefox on CF ~1 minute 20 seconds

I didn't try the CF Debian with swap on the SD as I'm not eager to use the SD for swap space. Down side of not using SD for swap is that Firefox chokes if you try and have more than one tab open without a swap running.

I guess the SD memory interface is not as much of a bottleneck as I originally thought.

Cheers,
Jerry

[wmadan]

Jerry,

So, if I don't plan to use wifi for anything but installing packages, then I really should put the swap file on a CF card. How did you do that? What scripts do I need to modify?

Bill

[jerrybme]

Jerry,

So, if I don't plan to use wifi for anything but installing packages, then I really should put the swap file on a CF card. How did you do that? What scripts do I need to modify?

Bill

If you're using the Cacko ROM, the easiest way is to use the memory applet on the task bar. First create a 64mb swapfile then switch it on.

If you prefer the command line way there are instructions on the debian-X/Qt wiki page.

Cheers,
Jerry

[wmadan]

Jerry,

Follow up questions for you: Do you have a swapfile in your debroot directory? I have one there and a line in the startd script to turn it on and off.

If I simply use the memory applet on the taskbar to create a swapfile on SD, it places it in /mnt/card.

Does the swapfile on SD have to be in debroot or can it be outside?

Thanks for your help.

Bill

[xjqian]

Does the swapfile on SD have to be in debroot or can it be outside?

As far as I was educated (by seasoned members here ), debain is blind to anything outside of debroot. You have to put swapfile inside debroot.

[jerrybme]

Does the swapfile on SD have to be in debroot or can it be outside?

As far as I was educated (by seasoned members here ), debain is blind to anything outside of debroot. You have to put swapfile inside debroot.

Well when I start the swapfile from within Cacko it is used by the X-Qt-Debian apps that are running. Proved by running cat /proc/meminfo from konsole on the Qt side of things. As Debian runs you can see the swapfile gettng used as it fills up. In my newbie brain this makes sense as debian is running inside Qt so why wouldn't it use memory allocated by the Qt system? Also if it were true that debian is blind to everything outside debroot, then network connections wouldn't work, yet I apt-get through the Qt WiFi connection just fine

You can help debian "see" things outside of debroot. By mounting /proc & the CF to /mnt/card/debroot/prc & /mnt/card/debroot/mnt/cf respectively.

Cheers
Jerry

[wmadan]

Jerry,

So then, if I use the memory applet to activate the swap space within Qt -- whether on CF or SD, I can delete the swapfile I created using hatchetman's wiki, yes? This would include modifying my startd script to remove the lines "swapon /swapfile" and "swapoff /swapfile."

Bill

[jerrybme]

Jerry,

So then, if I use the memory applet to activate the swap space within Qt -- whether on CF or SD, I can delete the swapfile I created using hatchetman's wiki, yes? This would include modifying my startd script to remove the lines "swapon /swapfile" and "swapoff /swapfile."

Bill

That's what I'm doing. You'll end up with a .swapfile in the root of your SD or CF cards. I started down this path as I found that the swapoff command in the startd script wasn't stopping my swapfile. So then I commented out the lines and tried starting the swapfile in Qt which seemed to work. I'd be interested if others find the same.

Let me know if it works for you too.

Cheers,
Jerry

[mars]

Jerry,

I followed your suggestions in your original post and used the xmodmaprc file you mentioned, but my keymappings are screwed up -- mostly the slash key.

**edit: this is on my C860 with Cacko 1.22**

If I run xev in the debian-x/qt environment, I get the same keycode of 47 for both the D key and the slash key. If I try changing the slash key to "slash", it also changes the D key.

If I press a number of different keys, all of the keymapping soon gets screwed up and I have to shutdown and restart debian-x/qt.

I've tried both the .xmodmaprc file in /home/zaurus as well as put the file in /root under debroot and done a 'xmodmap .xmodmaprc'

The only thing that didn't seem to work from the wiki instructions was:

Download the new keymap file into your home folder. ie: /home/zaurus. Run xmodmap <keymap file>

I used your xmodmaprc file, but the xmodmap command doesn't seem to work in qtopia. So I renamed your file to .xmodmaprc and the .xinitrc seemed to take care of the mapping (although with the above problems).

Thanks much,
mars

[jerrybme]

Jerry,

I followed your suggestions in your original post and used the xmodmaprc file you mentioned, but my keymappings are screwed up -- mostly the slash key.

**edit: this is on my C860 with Cacko 1.22**

If I run xev in the debian-x/qt environment, I get the same keycode of 47 for both the D key and the slash key. If I try changing the slash key to "slash", it also changes the D key.

If I press a number of different keys, all of the keymapping soon gets screwed up and I have to shutdown and restart debian-x/qt.

I've tried both the .xmodmaprc file in /home/zaurus as well as put the file in /root under debroot and done a 'xmodmap .xmodmaprc'

The only thing that didn't seem to work from the wiki instructions was:

Download the new keymap file into your home folder. ie: /home/zaurus. Run xmodmap <keymap file>

I used your xmodmaprc file, but the xmodmap command doesn't seem to work in qtopia. So I renamed your file to .xmodmaprc and the .xinitrc seemed to take care of the mapping (although with the above problems).

Thanks much,
mars

Yes you have to rename the file. Also did you disable the keyhelper app?

CODE

khctl disable

I run this before running debian but have found it also works running it in Qt while a X/Qt session is running works too.
Cheers,
Jerry

[Chero]

Hi,

I'm a pdaX-fan, but I think this is really having the best of both.
I managed to set up X/QT-pocketworkstation in about half an hour thanks to your excellent instructions.
I created a simple script ("debstart") to :
- mount proc
- mount "cf", "sd" and "home/zaurus" in the debian chroot
- disable keyhelper app
then I also have a script "debstop" to do the opposite

Thanks for the instructions on how to set it up !!!

BTW : Do Rox-desktop and filer work on pocketworkstation ?
(can't check out all the things i'd like (synaptic, gnumeric, kbudget, qcad, qgis, ...) for the moment, I will only have my 2Gb SD back next week)

Cheers,
Chero.