Hey all,

Sorry for not posting earlier, I had to put my nokia770 and all I was doing a bit on hold.

So, how to get e17 up and running in your debian sid?

Well, it takes a bit of work although not much.

The whole procedure relies on you being able to run an image of your SID under full emulation in qemu. That's where you will build e17 and then copy it over to your tablet. Yes, it's far from satisfactory, but it works.

First of all, you should be running qemu ver. 0.9.1. You can get a copy from here: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
The usual procedure of configure && make && make install apply. For more info on how to install qemu please refer to the website listed above.

So, assuming you've installed qemu satisfactorily, we can carry on. You will need a file that acts as a harddisk for qemu. A 1G file usually works. Create it with

The reason behind using a complete disk file as opposed to the cow format that shrinks/enlarges it dynamically is that we will be mounting the file as a drive in our box later on.

Unfortunately, you have to half-install debian on the file. Actually, you have to use the debian installer to create the filesystem on the file itself (you can always partition it with fdisk). So follow the instructions in http://www.aurel32.net/info/debian_arm_qemu.php
for doing so. Please note that you don't need to install the full debian, all you need is for the installer to partition your disk (file) and for it to create the filesystem. The same effect can be achieved by using one of those rescue cds (you could boot it in qemu, etc). I haven't tried it myself because once you've done it once you don't really need to do it again (unless you delete the file).

So, hopefully you have now a 1G file that contains a partition table and a parition (or more) with an ext2 filesystem on it.

Now it's time to transfer the SID you have in your memory card to the file that acts as HD for qemu. Create the image the usual way: (pwd: /media/disk/ <-- change the path to reflect your card)
tar c * > sid_image.tar

To mount the partition inside the file acting as HD for qemu (say its name is hda.img) follow this guide: http://edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/linux_loopback.html
if the ext2 partition you created is the first partition you can mount it with:
Then it's just a matter of untarring the SID image into the file.

Once you've done that, just boot into your qemu and build e17.

Sorry for the messy and long post. Hopefully sometime soon I will make it more detailed and howto structured.

In the meantime, is there an interest in creating an alternative distro/environment for the 770 and later models? I'm finding that in order to get the best out of the tablets a customised set of packages should be created, i.e. gentoo style. I've been checking out mamona and there's already one person building all the packages for the 770. Mamona+e17+some apps (web browser, etc.) should be a nice combo!

Cheerio!

U