Qole, I have formated twice into ext2, not fat32, and am still getting errors not allowing the file to be more than 2 GB. I tried setting it your 3 GB and 2.7 GB, and both failed to get the file larger than 2 GB. This is definitely not a fat32 issue since the image is on the ext2.

I can tell you by setting the first partition to fat32 256 MB, it cleared issues with the file manager detecting the microSD card. I might try the dd thing on another computer and transfer the blank image to the microSD card - that might work.

If I extract the debian-squeeze-rootfs.tar.bz2 to the ext2 partition instead of the image on the ext2, will that cause easy debian not to work? That would clarify all issues with this image file - which is becoming more of a hassle than a blessing.

Qole, I have formated twice into ext2, not fat32, and am still getting errors not allowing the file to be more than 2 GB. I tried setting it your 3 GB and 2.7 GB, and both failed to get the file larger than 2 GB. This is definitely not a fat32 issue since the image is on the ext2.

I can tell you by setting the first partition to fat32 256 MB, it cleared issues with the file manager detecting the microSD card. I might try the dd thing on another computer and transfer the blank image to the microSD card - that might work.

If I extract the debian-squeeze-rootfs.tar.bz2 to the ext2 partition instead of the image on the ext2, will that cause easy debian not to work? That would clarify all issues with this image file - which is becoming more of a hassle than a blessing.

johndoe:

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear in my last post; if you are going to the trouble of repartitoning your SD card, you should definitely use the dedicated partiton for the rootfs rather than the image file. The image file is only for convenience.

To use your new partiton, edit the ~/.chroot file to say:

IMGFILE=/dev/mmcblk1p2

Heya qole!

Pop quiz.

If I have easy debian installed, will all of these following armel .deb files then be installable on the tablet?

http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/Debian/armel.0.0.htm

There's an amazing selection of junk on that site and it would be awesome if at least some of them I could download and install.

Thanks.

Addison: Probably. You'd go into the Easy Debian root terminal and then use dpkg -i to install the .deb packages...

Sweet!

I've install easy debian before but was much too stupid to know what could be done with it back then.

I'll definitely give this another go.

Thanks!

Qole,

If I have extracted either the debian*root-fs.tar.bz2 or the minimal*debian*.tar.bz2 to the ext2 or ext3 partition on my /dev/mmc1 memory card (where the debian install looks like "/" on debian), what do I change in .chroot to allow it not to look for a .ext2 file, but rather the files residing on an ext2 or ext3 partition?

My .chroot reads:
IMGFILE=/dev/mmcblk1p2 (the ext2 or ext3 partition)
CHROOT=/media/mmc1/debian/debian (where the "/" files are for debian)

Running debbie as user yields:
...Everything set up, running chroot...
chroot: cannot execut su: No such file or directory

A cd /media/mmc1/debian/debian && ls shows:
bin, boot, dev, etc, home, lib, lost+found, media, mnt, opt, etc...

Extracting the *.bz2s with xarchiver yielded no errors.

How do I get CHROOT to detect these extracted files?

Thanks,
John

Did you extract preserving permissions (typically -p option with tar)??? Your applications under /media/mmc1/debian/debian/{bin,sbin,usr/bin,usr/sbin} are probably not executable.

Debian usually puts it in bin/su, so ls -l /media/mmc1/debian/debian/bin/su and see if it has -rwxr-xr-x or similar. It may be -rwsr-xr-x if it has set uid enabled.

Actually, the bin folder is empty. So is the boot. The other folders are not. I am guessing xarchiver cannot preserve permissions upon extract, so I'll retry extract with tar -xvfp *.tar.bz2

johndoe:

I suggest not changing the CHROOT line in your .chroot file. That is the location where your partition will be mounted, and leaving it as /debian is the best idea, unless you've got some specific reason why you would change that.

Also, make sure that your first partition on the SD card is a small FAT partition (256 MB), because Maemo will try to mount it, and you don't want Maemo mounting your Debian partition.

Also, try extracting with gnutar xjvf for best results