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Easy Debian

Revision as of 04:22, 28 October 2008

This is a very rough first draft.

This package, when installed, will give you OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, the IceWM window manager, Firefox 3.0 (called Iceweasel in Debian) with Java support, printing support, and access to thousands of applications that can be easily browsed and downloaded.

This package will give you all of these applications without any need for installing dependencies or other applications, and it should work on all of the tablets.

What you need:

• You need 1.3 GB free on one of your memory cards (this includes the built-in 2GB on the N810), although after installing, you will only need 1 GB.
• You need to keep your expectations reasonable. Big desktop applications like OpenOffice and Firefox run slowly on the tablet. They are designed for big, power-hungry CPUs. The N8x0's processor is comparable to a Pentium II processor. Just imagine running these apps on your computer from the mid-90s (remember Windows 95?), and you'll get the idea. But sometimes, you really need something on the tablet that only these apps can provide, like MS Word compatibility or Java applets.

Install instructions:

• You need to install the easy-deb-chroot package. Click on that link on your tablet and open it with the Application Manager.
• When this package is installed, you have to run the "Debian Image Installer" in your Extras menu. This will download and install the big image to the memory card of your choice. It will take about a half hour to download if you have fast Internet connection, and another 15 minutes to extract it on your tablet.

This may take longer... Start the install when you can leave your tablet downloading for a while, maybe just before bed or before going out

• Finally, when you get the "Congratulations!" message, REBOOT.

Using the LXDE Environment:

• Switching to OS2008: Just press the "Home" key (with the house on it) to get back to OS2008.
• Switching to LXDE: Click on the icon on the left hand side of OS2008, or use the Home key to choose IceWM.
• Onscreen Keyboard: The button to the left of the "x-terminal" button on the toolbar pops up an on-screen keyboard. Getting this to work can be tricky sometimes. I've found that it helps to check the "Always on top?" on the xvkbd menu (lower left corner of kbd), even though it doesn't actually keep the keyboard on top, then click on the app that you want to type in, then click on a key on the keyboard. This brings the keyboard to the top but lets you type in the app.
• Exiting LXDE: Log out, don't just close the window.

International (non-English speaking) users:

Please click on the "Debian chroot" icon and type the following command:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Choose your language(s).

Note that you should choose the language with no period between the language and the iso code (eg. "en_CA ISO-8859-1"), and optionally, the utf-8 version, too (eg. "en_CA.UTF-8").

Want more install space?

If you want more space for installing stuff, you can purge all of the language and localization files that you aren't using. Make sure you have configured your locales (as shown above) first.

Click on the "Debian chroot" icon and type the following command:

apt-get install localepurge; localepurge

This will get you at least 80MB back. You should probably do this first, before starting to install. Running out of space during an install in Debian is ugly.

Also, remember to frequently use "apt-get clean" to clear out old downloaded packages. That will help with free space. You can also probably safely delete lots of support packages. For example, if you don't plan to print from your applications, you can probably do "apt-get remove --purge cups"

Some notes / warnings:

• As I said above, the big desktop apps start up really slowly, especially Iceweasel (since it has no splash screen). The tablet seems to be sitting there, doing nothing, sometimes for a long time. Don't hammer the button, you'll just get several copies trying to start at the same time, slowing things down even more.
• If you want to use the apps in OS2008 with an N800, you will need an external keyboard, the matchbox-keyboard included with the package or the maemo xkbd port. You want the OS2008 version. If you install it, you maybe should use debernardis' method given here.
• OpenOffice is completely OS2008 unfriendly. If you run it in OS2008, there's no icon on the left-hand app panel. If you lose your OpenOffice screen, or you need it fullscreen, use the included "Make OpenOffice Fullscreen" (in the Extras menu). I would have made one for AbiWord too, since the AbiWord fullscreen hides all the menu bars, but AbiWord sets the window title to your document name so I have no idea what window to fullscreen.
• This deb messes with very little in OS2008. After install, your tablet should remain much the way it was before.
• Please note, however, that, in order to run properly on the tablet, running Debian apps have access to a lot of stuff, and they can possibly do damage, although none has been reported so far. This chroot isn't much of a "jail", on purpose. Experimenting can occasionally have some unexpected results. Sometimes, installing or updating an app will shut down or restart an important service on the tablet as part of the install. This can sometimes cause the tablet to freeze or reboot. The good news is that a reboot will always fix whatever went wrong.
• The matchbox-keyboard menu item causes the matchbox keyboard (father to our tablet stylus keyboard) to pop up, or if it is up, the menu item makes it go away. There's no "hide" button on the matchbox-keyboard, so you have to use the menu item to hide it.
• To run a Debian application as user from the command line, type "debbie <command>". If you need to run the app as root, use "sudo debian <command>".
• I install qwerty12's movable-windows hack for OS2008. You really need it for running Debian programs in OS2008. If you hate that, uninstall my .deb, or copy /etc/osso-af-init/matchbox.defs.orig back to matchbox.defs and everything will be the way it was before.