So, I did notice a couple of things with my install now that I've had ample time to use it.
* Debian Hardware Keys no longer work --- at least not full screen. For example, after running it, pressing minus then full screen within Firefox will just highlight the contents of the address bar. Any ideas on how to fix?
* If I run apps from the Hildon desktop, they run as root. If I run the apps from LXDE, they run as user.
* Also, if I run apps from LXDE, are much slower (due to the overhead maybe?)
* Performance overall is GREATLY improved when using a cloned system with a swap partition.

That's all for now, but help with the fullscreen issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

hordeman: you were right, there was a bug in the debbie script that wasn't running apps as "user", and that broke the HW keys script, too.

New versions of both of my packages are being loaded into Extras-devel, and I'll promote to Extras as soon as I test the install.

Many thanks for this. Tried it yesterday, just a few things I noted:

1) Would an updated image file be possible? The current one (as of yesterday) has ~150mb free space, but requires ~250mb of extra space just to update the existing programs. I personally hit a circular dependency in Synaptic, where Epiphany-gecko 2.23 needed to be removed (dummy package) for Epiphany 2.28 but couldn't due to a broken update-alternatives.

2) What does the performance mode do - put the processor to full speed 100% of the time or something else? A "performance changed" screen would be nice; currently it doesn't tell whether it worked or not.

3) Considering that the minimum card required is 2GB, perhaps more free space could be added to the image file?

4) By default, the various menu items were added to three different folders. Would an "EasyDeb" folder not be tidier?

Edit: Ah well. Thanks for the info anyway

Hibernica:

1) Don't update the image. It isn't meant to be updated. There are many problems with trying to update the image, one the worst of which is the fact that OpenOffice no longer runs. Many of the problems are the fault of the Debian armel Sid distribution, which seems to be in a particularly bad state right now.

2) Performance mode sets the processor governor speed to 400 mHz, so it will always run at full speed, instead of regularly falling back to much lower speeds as it does in the "on demand" speed. It is simply a shell script with no GUI. If you provide an easy way to display a hildon banner from the command line, I will use that method instead.

3) I don't think I should make the N8x0 image any bigger, since the N810 comes with only 2GB onboard. If you want more space, the best thing to do is to partition a card and put the rootfs into the partition.

4) There is no facility that I know of for making new menu folders when installing an app. If there were, I certainly would have done it that way!

So.. I've been playing around with easy debian on my n810 for a few days now, trying to breathe some new life into this old device that's been becoming boring. I thought I'd share some of my successes and failures with it.

As for what versions of things I'm using, the easy-debian-whatever package from extras, and the latest debian-squeeze-rootfs from qole's site.

The geometry I decided on is:

(Disclaimer: Don't do this unless you know what you are doing!)

Internal flash
- Default maemo install. Nothing special here

2GB Internal "card"
- 256MB swap partition
- 1.6GB ext2 partition - debian rootfs lives here

8GB External card
- 8GB ext3 partition - for user files

I've read it's recommended to have at least some vfat on the drives, but I don't really see the point, as long as /etc/fstab is set up correctly.

That said, I've noticed a few quirks:
- The external card sometimes auto-mounts to both /media/mmc1 and /media/mmc2. Is there some auto-mounting service that should be disabled in this case?
- The swap partition is not turned on automatically, despite being in fstab. The easy way around it is to just run 'swapon /dev/mmcblk0p1' at bootup. Surely I'm missing something obvious here..

What works:
- Debian chroots extremely fast.
- LXDE is almost faster than the default maemo desktop.
- Pretty much everything I haven't mentioned.
- Obviously, the big apps (GIMP, iceweasel, openoffice) are a bit slow, but tolerable.

What doesn't work, but doesn't really matter:
- Synaptic is slow/hangs/just plain doesn't work. Not really a big deal to just use apt-get instead.
- Have not yet tried sound. Maemo-mplayer is reportedly faster/better, so easy to still use that or something like Canola for media playing.

What doesn't work at all:
- The Fn key does not work in debian. using 'Set Debian HW Keys' seems to have no effect. Is there a hack around this?
- Switch-lxde is really outdated. I've tried doing a simple mount /usr/bin /debian/usr/local/bin, but most apps just throw errors. Is there another clever way to make maemo apps work within the debian chroot (particularly maemo-mapper)?
- Flash in iceweasel does work, but youtube videos don't play properly. Originally I thought "I'll just upgrade flash", but then remembered this is arm, not x86.

My todo list:
- find statusbar app(s) for things like network and battery status (any recommendations here?).
- Try sound. gnome-alsa-mixer at least appears to work.
- Try different window managers (any tips on this?).
- The easy-debian chroot method should work with any rootfs distro for arm. Try some (xubuntu? mer?).
- Get USB host mode to *actually* work in both maemo and debian. Being able to mount an external drive would be very cool (yes I know the onboard usb has very low power output).

Things that would be nice, but are a little unrealistic:
- See if the onboard camera works in debian (any recommended apps to test this with?)
- Get that cool status/notification LED to work from within debian. I think there were actually some pretty low-level scripts for the led at one point?


It may sound like I'm running into lots of little troubles, but so far I'm very happy and impressed at how well this works overall.

By leaving a small vfat partition on the external card, you give Maemo something to automount. And it does like to automount!

try "touch .synchroot" from ~ before initializing your chroot; this should copy things like the N810's keyboard map to the chroot.

This is a very confusing paragraph. The switch-lxde script (from my repository) is designed to shut down the Hildon desktop and start up the LXDE desktop in its place. It doesn't have anything to do with getting maemo apps working in the chroot. As far as I know, it isn't "outdated"... What's outdated about it? Can you give clear bug reports, so I can fix things? If you can help me fix / update the LXDE desktop replacement project, please post in that thread. The basic Easy Debian package has no scripts for doing anything like that.

I posted two little python scripts that work in conjunction with my Easy Mer project, one for the battery and one for the wlan. You can find them attached here. There's also a menu in the Easy Mer package that lets you run Maemo apps from within the chroot desktop. Install the Easy Mer package to get all three of the scripts.

If you are running LXDE as a secondary desktop, on top of Maemo, you can't really run Maemo apps in the LXDE desktop because they resist being run in display :1.

YouTube used to work in my Easy Debian chroot. Maybe something has changed?

It should work fine as long as you plug it in before opening your chroot.

It works if you find an app that can do V4L2 (and there are surprisingly few apps that can!) and point the app to /dev/video0.

How to change "motion buffer size" in Xephyr?

Possible work-around ? :
On my N810 Ctrl-Chr works in easy-mer.

[ Using easy-debian from extras and debian-m5-v2-rootfs.tgz ]

It seems that for the N810 keyboard, easy-debian uses the rx-44 file in
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/ , not in
/debian/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/ ??

By accident I finally found a way to get proper swedish umlauts in easy-debian.
Changes to the rx-44 file in the /debian/usr/--- directory hadn't helped,
but then I happened to put the same modified rx-44 file into the /usr/--- directory, and hey presto, I got swedish instead of danish umlauts in leafpad and OOo under easy-debian!
( In the chroot terminal, though, they had always appeared.)

Ctrl-Chr works in easy-mer but not, it seems, in easy-debian, except in the chroot terminal.
So I changed type="EIGHT_LEVEL" chr-maps in the rx-44 file to 4-level, keeping the swedish but deleting the danish umlauts.

EDIT: Or you could reorder the eight characters so that the first four are those you want in easy-debian.

I will personally gift a full box of Fluffernutters to anyone who attempts to install Scid through Easy Debian.

It only has a couple of dependency issues.
Scid