My Zaurus Ubuntu Install Log, Ubuntu Zaurus Options

[Chadarius]

I have to restart 3 times before I get a console that I can log into. I get a fsck run right away that is rather annoying with a reboot. Then I get a kernel panic so I restart. Then it works all of a sudden. I'm pretty sure this has to do the the date being set to 1970. I tried adding -localtime to the qemu command line parameters but that didn't seem to fix it really. I imagine this won't happen on the real hardware.

Once I login I run the following:

• date -s "05/13/2008" #set to the current date
• apt-get install ntpdate #need to check if this adds it into cron
• tzselect #follow the prompts
• apt-get update
• apt-get upgrade
• apt-get install less #I can't get along with out it
• apt-get install icewm
• apt-get install firefox
• apt-get xterm

I've been trying various packages.
icewm - pretty ugly at the moment, but it launches just fine.
Firefox - doesn't launch. It nails the cpu for a while and then nothing happens. I think maybe there isn't enough memory perhaps? Seems to me that I need to set qemu to 64mb RAM and setup a swap file to make things more similar to my c3000.
xterm - it works fine.

What is everyone else running? What's working? What's not? I'm so stoked about this! I hope I can find more time tomorrow to mess around and get a few more things working. I think I'm going to setup a bzr repository of my tarball so I can recover from the massively huge mistakes I'll be making over the next few weeks .

Later,
Chad

[Chadarius]

So I've been playing around a little bit more. I've made a whole mess of little scripts to handle creating the virtual qemu drive and untar the rootfs back into it. I also created a script to generate a new tarball when I want. This has made my horrible mistakes... er I mean my testing go much smoother.

Here is what my general install procedure is like.

makezubuntudisk script:

CODE

#!/bin/bash
echo Creating zubuntu-qemu image with dd...
dd if=/dev/zero of=zubuntu-qemu bs=1MB count=4096
echo Formatting zubuntu-qemu
sudo mke2fs -F -m 0 -b 1024 zubuntu-qemu

createrootfs script:

CODE

#!/bin/bash
echo Creating qemu directory
mkdir qemu
echo Mounting zubuntu-qemu image at ./qemu
sudo mount -t ext2 -o loop zubuntu-qemu qemu
cd qemu
echo Untarring rootfs to ./qemu. Please wait...
sudo tar -zxpf ../sdinstall/android-root.tar.gz
echo Untar completed.
cd ..
sudo umount qemu

You will notice that I have an sdinstall directory. This is where I keep the files to put on the SD card for installs. So naturally the android-root.tar.gz file is located there.

startzaurus script:

CODE

#!/bin/bash
qemu-system-arm \
-M versatilepb -kernel zImage-versatile-2.6.24-rc7.armv5tel \
-append "root=/dev/sda ip=bootp" \
-hda zubuntu-qemu -localtime -startdate now \
-usbdevice tablet \
-net nic -net user,script=/etc/qemu-ifup

I've made a few minor changes to Cortez suggestions. I added the -localtime and the -startdate now settings. This sets the date and time for me immediately and I don't have to worry about remembering the set anything with the date command after I startup.

Once I boot into the qemu session I run the follow commands

CODE

apt-get install less ntpdate enlightenment xinit xdm sylpheed dillo xterm abiword gnumeric thunar menu console-data wireless-config gtkeyboard

Then I run

CODE

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

and set my timezone appropriately

When I'm working on my PC, the /etc/init.d/keymap file sets the keyboard to use the zaurus keymap. That drives me nuts so I disable that by moving the file out of /etc/init.d. This is temporary and before I create a new rootfs I put it back so the Zaurus has the right keyboard layout.

You can use

CODE

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

to reconfigure your keyboard to your PC's setup.

I then setup a user ID and passwords

CODE

passwd #set the root password
useradd -d /home/suttonca suttonca #create a normal user id
usermod suttonca -G users dialout voice cdrom sudo audio video games suttonca

When I've got things configured they way on want from qemu I run the following script to create a new rootfs.

makerootfs script:

CODE

#!/bin/bash
echo Mounting image to qemu
sudo mount -t ext2 -o loop zubuntu-qemu qemu
cd qemu
echo Creating tarball...
sudo tar -czpf ../zubuntu-custom-rootfs.tar.gz .
cd ..
sudo umount qemu
echo Removing previous tarball
rm sdinstall/android-root.tar.gz
echo Moving new tarball to sdinstall directory
mv zubuntu-custom-rootfs.tar.gz sdinstall/android-root.tar.gz
echo Completed.

Well that's my update for now. I'm going to create a new rootfs with all that in it and try it out!

[Chadarius]

I started messing around with getting my Ambicom wireless card working. It seemed to load the drivers fine. However, for some reason when I ran ifup wlan0, the dhcp client was not working properly. I kept getting a "execve (/lib/dhcp3-client/call-dhclient-script, …): Permission denied" error.

After a quick google search someone else with the same issue just ran "apt-get install --reinstall dhcp3-client" to fix the issue. That seemed to work for me just fine as well.