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[metal.lunchbox]

*** Update: Deborah 0.5 is already ready already. get it now. ***

Inspired by Teapot's Ubuntu, DebXO, and the new F11 for the xo-1, I decided to try my hand at putting together a fast and lightweight, working install of Debian with the easy to use LXDE desktop environment with a current Kernel and better hardware support. I hastily called it Deborah. If you have an SD card and want a functional desktop, give Deborah a try. I won't claim that it is categorically better than the previously mentioned setup but I think its a great balance of speed, features, size, and usability.

You can install it to a USB flash drive if you like but it will run faster and more reliably on an SD card. It must be at least 1GB, but 2Gb or larger is highly recommended.

How I made Deborah. I started with a debootstraped debian squeeze base filesystem and transplanted the boot folder, modules, and firmware from F11 for the xo-1. F11 is actively developed so new kernels and modules are always being churned out. I made the necessary adjustments to make it boot properly and then installed LXDE and other desktop software via the apt-get tool. Then it was just a little tweaking and installing a few scripts or configurations from Teapot's Ubuntu and various places on this forum and wiki.laptop.org.

The Google Code Project page is a useful place to view information about this project. There will be more there as this project develops.

What's new in 0.5?

• all new look with New Wave theme and Tango icon theme
• better shutdown and reboot without confusing console output
• fullscreen mode works in most applications now with the window button next to the volume up button
• Fbreader installed with gtk interface. allowing one to read pretty much any ebook format available.
• evince pdf viewer now appears in the menu again[\li]
  

Installing Deborah on the XO
Download the archive from sendspace.com . You'll need a USB stick to hold the files, unless you still have several hundred mb free on the XO's built in memory. The archive is about 230mb. The install process is almost identical to Teapot's Ubuntu Intrepid.

You will need to have updated your olpc's software to at least 8.2.1 before installing Deborah.

Before inserting the SD card stop the haldaemon

Code:

su
/etc/init.d/haldaemon stop

Now insert the SD and reformat it with the following command

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4096 count=1
echo -e ',,L,*\n\n\n' | sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0
mke2fs -jLDeborah /dev/mmcblk0p1

Mount the SD card and unpack the tarball and you should be ready to go

Code:

mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
cd /mnt
tar xvzf /PATH/TO/DEBORAH_ARCHiVE_.tgz

The default username and password are 'olpc' and 'password' . The root password is the same.

After booting into Deborah
Open the menu by clicking the icon in the bottom left of the screen and find the terminal under the Accessories menu. Now update your package info and upgrade to the latest versions.

Code:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

Set the timezone

Code:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

You can install any software you like from a multitude of available debian packages like so..

Code:

sudo apt-get install iceweasel pidgeon flashplugin-nonfree ....

You can change your password with the passwd command

Known Issues
Power management does not provide suspend on idle and some users have had problems after resuming like losing use of the keyboard and inadvertently shutting down the laptop.

Comments, criticisms, and suggests are all welcome.

[mavrothal]

Since I do not have a spare SDcard right now, I tried it in a USB stick. I used the sendspace version and corrected the olpc.fth to point at the USB, but t failed to load pass the OFW screen. Either with general protection error or with incorrect file size loading the initrd or with just nothing.
Could be my USB stick  (that has gone through a lot...) but do you know if DEBorah will run from USB at all. Have you checked ever? In general F11-XO1 kernel/initrd do run from USB (with some SCSI complains), but I do not know what other changes you introduced. Is it using the pristine  OLPC kernel/initrd?

[mavrothal]

So, I got a brand new Kingstone Class 6 and untared the tarball into it and on boot the OFW stops with "Invalid Opcode". Drops to the ok prompt and that's the end of it.
Does anyone had the same problem or managed to install Deborah successfully?

Edit OK, I managed to boot
You need to change the boot arguments in /boot/olpc.fth to

Code:

" ro root=LABEL=Deborah rootfstype=ext3 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 fbcon=font:SUN12x22 selinux=0 rowait" to boot-file

However, there is no wireless. Scanning finds no networks. ifconfig does not show eth0 and ifup eth0 says unknown interface.
You can not power off! the only available option was logout. I had to go to the console and shutdown from there (I guess the terminal would also do but I had already logged out).
sbin is not in the path so you must type /sbin/command to get these commands going
sudo does not ask for a password, but that's OK I guess.

I did not go any further. Is certainly faster than teapot's Ubuntu and pleasant to use but needs a v 0.2 soon  
Nice going metal!

[metal.lunchbox]

I think this is a permissions issue. I have Deborah running on an SD card and a USB stick and have no problem with it. It sounds like it is not preserving the ownership of the files when expanding the tarball. I am honestly not sure why this is an issue with this archive and not others. The solution might be as simple as adding a flag to the tar command so that it becomes...

tar xvpzf /path/to/Deborah-0.1.20091218.tgz

I agree that a 0.2 release should be made available as soon as possible. I wanted to make this preliminary release to speed up that process, allow others to help get power management working and to hash out any basic issues like the one you describe with broken ownership. what do you get with this command:

ls -l /home/

is olpc home folder owned by "olpc" or something like "500"?

[mavrothal]

No, permissions are fine! Was the extreme overclocking that was generating the problems I did re-untar with the xvzpf opptions but all the same.
So, to get the wireless you must set it to eth1 (you can see during boot that eth0 is shifted to eth1 and msh0 to eth2). And log out is still the only option.
I'm posting this from Deborah
More later tonight.

[metal.lunchbox]

I'm honestly a little baffled. The system itself works fine it is something to do with how I made the tarball or something. I'll try to see if I can follow my instructions and replicate your problem. Then I'll try to fix it hold on.

james

[mavrothal]

I'm honestly a little baffled. The system itself works fine it is something to do with how I made the tarball or something. I'll try to see if I can follow my instructions and replicate your problem. Then I'll try to fix it hold on.

james

I can see that some of the little bugs might be the tarball formation, but the overclocking is really extreme and can really damage the machine. Very few XOs can perform at 566MHz CPU 216MHz memory bus.
There is a number of other little bugs (like pressing ctrl+F to search within any application brings up a terminal!) that I find along as I use it but I guess I'll wait for v 0.2
About the power management is missing ohmd and maybe you need to recompile from source if you tried the deb package and failed.

[metal.lunchbox]

I'll change the overclock settings. Better to just use the defaults and let people overclock as they like. I was not aware of the ctl+f problem. I'll look into it as that would indeed be very annoying. I'll give ohmd another try and just make an image of the disk, since I'm having such confusing problems with the tarball.

So expect a replacement Deborah 0.1 very soon. 0.2 will follow as soon as I can get power management working and a few bugs worked out.

[mavrothal]

OK.
While you are at it you may also want to look at the sudo setup. GUI applications that need administrative authority (synaptic, gparted etc) will only launch from the terminal with the current set up (unless this is also a tarring issue).

[metal.lunchbox]

concerning sudo and the GUI, the good news is that there aren't any installed apps that require authetication. Of course if someone wanted to use gparted or synaptic they would need to use the terminal in the current setup. This has nothing to do with the archiving issues previously discussed and will be fixed in the 0.2 update. Thank you for bringing this up.

[quickboot]

When I first tried booting, I received some "unrecoverable error"

However I just took out the card, rebooted into Sugar, shutdown, put the card back in and rebooted so that I could report here what the error was. However this time it actually booted to the desktop. Unfortunately the radio appears to be disabled, so it displays that there are no available networks.

I've very nervous about such extreme overclocking, so I doubt I'll mess around anymore with this initial Deborah 0.1 image.

However thanks for uploading and getting a faster booting OS working on the table!

I can't wait for people to get this, Puppy Linux or other rapidly booting OS's to work!

[mavrothal]

Unfortunately the radio appears to be disabled, so it displays that there are no available networks.

Just change the eth0 to eth1 in the wicd window and wirless is OK.

I've very nervous about such extreme overclocking, so I doubt I'll mess around anymore with this initial Deborah 0.1 image.

Just change the the "661" line to "5dd" in the olpc.fth file (sudo nano /boot/olpc.fth) and you are safe (and still modestly overclocked ).
C'mon give it a spin. Report any issues to metal for v0.2

[metal.lunchbox]

I made a new archive. I installed it myself and it worked fine. I've updated the link. I'm just waiting for someone else to confirm that they have successfully installed it without the problems mentioned above from the previous archive. Networking should work fine without changes, and there is graphical authentiation for apps that need it like gparted or synaptic.

james

[mavrothal]

OK, I tried the new version.
Overclock is gone and now shutdown works properly.
The wicd issue remains. You have to set it to eth1 to get it connected. Indeed looking at the /var/log/messages I can see that the eth0 to eth1 moving is not happening when you run it in your machine Do you by any chance have a usb-nic adapter connected to your XO?
Also the launching of administrative apps remains (synaptic still fails to launch from the menu) as well as the ctrl+f.
A new one is inability to set font sizes through the openbox configuration. Works only for the window tittle. I think was working fine in the previous version (not sure though)
PS: I prefer Opera as default. Chrome does not support the XO buttons...

[ibboucco]

"Also the launching of administrative apps remains (synaptic still fails to launch from the menu)"


- very newbie .  root terminal fails to accept password
currently upgrading