Altboot Or Ipkg-link? (the 3 Hassles Of Ipkg)

[BeKind]

I've been reading a little about Altboot, and it seems pretty cool.

I have used ipkg to install everything on SD, so i'm able to use all 64 MB on my collie for system memory.

One problem I have with ipkg-link is sometimes it does stupid things, and you have to go back and make or fix some links by hand.  One example is I tried to install some glossaries for QPSword and it can't do it automatically because the data directory is already a link, and it's trying to make links inside of links, so I have to do it by hand.

Also, I get the problem that sometimes if my Z freezes and I have to flip the switch on the back, some of the links will disappear and I have to run ipkg-link again on some of the packages.  I've always wondered why that is, and what we can do to fix it?  Does anyone else experience this problem?  Those links are on the ROM they shouldn't go away just because you do a soft reboot, but they do.  Why?

Another nuisance is that if you try to run the graphical package manager (which I don't because of this) when you install a new package it goes back and redoes the links for EVERYTHING which takes way too long.

So because of the 3 hassles I just mentioned, I am open to another option, and Altboot might be pretty good.

OR

Has anyone found good solutions to any of those hassles, and decided to keep with ipkg-link?


Obviously if you are using multiple-boot options, you need Altboot, but what about someone like me who is just trying to avoid those hassles with ipkg-link, is it worth it to use Altboot instead?  (Will it even help?)

[JohnX]

I'm a convert to altboot.  What I do is altboot to my SD card. After that my SD card is /, so when I install anything with ipkg to "root" it ends up putting it on the SD card. ipkg-link doesn't even come into the picture. Also, I can easily backup the whole file system on my SD card to my desktop every so often and roll back to a previous backup if I screw something up.

[BeKind]

Quick question about AltBoot.

Let's say you flash a rootfs onto your Z, and then you tell AltBoot to boot from the SD.  Does that mean you have to copy what was on the 16 MB of ROM (the rootfs) onto the SD and that the 16 MB of ROM never gets used any more?

--BeKind

[JohnX]

Quick question about AltBoot.

Let's say you flash a rootfs onto your Z, and then you tell AltBoot to boot from the SD.  Does that mean you have to copy what was on the 16 MB of ROM (the rootfs) onto the SD and that the 16 MB of ROM never gets used any more?

--BeKind
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The thing you flash onto the Zaurus' "ROM" (FYIi: it's not really ROM, it's actually just flash memory) is usually called an image. It's a file that contains a jffs2 filesystem. There are two ways to use altboot:
1) Just have an ext2 filesystem on your SD card. You'd get a setup like this by just unpacking a something-rootfs.tar.gz onto an ext2 formatted SD card or letting altboot do the unpacking for you.
2) you can have more than one ext2 image (files containg ext2 filesystems) on your SD card under /boot and choose which one to boot when you start your Zaurus. I use method 1 since I'm willing to devote the whole SD card to one install.

As for the ~16MB of flash on the Zaurus: You can mount it and move files around on it, but altboot runs from it, so you can't format it clean.

And after typing all that I ran into this: [a href=\"http://openzaurus.org/wordpress/howto/the-altboot-faq/]http://openzaurus.org/wordpress/howto/the-altboot-faq/[/url] in another thread. That might explain it better than I have. Good luck.

[BeKind]

Ok, so what I get from that, is that once you have AltBoot installed and booting from your SD card, then the flash doesn't get used any more (unless you change the option in AltBoot to boot from the flash again.)

That sounds fine to me.  Then all you need on the ROM(flash)(16MB) is AltBoot itself and enough of an O/S that you can fall back on it if the SD card gets messed up.  So I'm taking up 16 (14) more MB by using AltBoot because all the stuff I had on the flash I need on the SD now, too.  That isn't a problem for me, the SD i have is .5 GB, so I'm not worried about that space.

Does that sounds right?

[JohnX]

Yup. I just have a whole copy of GPE installed to the internal flash (aka "ROM"). I didn't bother trying to weed out stuff that I don't really need.

[CoreDump]

Yup. I just have a whole copy of GPE installed to the internal flash (aka "ROM"). I didn't bother trying to weed out stuff that I don't really need.
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FWIW, altboot works fine from a bootstrap image, freeing up a few MB on the internal flash