[Debian] New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

RELEASE NOTES AND MORE INFO CAN BE FOUND ON THE WIKI: http://www.internettablettalk.com/wi...p?title=Debian

I've just put together a new tarball of Debian for the N800 and N810. This time it includes the XFCE4 desktop. Here are some screenshots:
Here's GMPC music player:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ts/gmpcxwd.jpg
And Epiphany web browser w/ the webkit backend:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...piphanyxwd.jpg

Current status:
What works:

* X11
* Touchscreen
* Wireless (even WPA!)
* CPU frequency scaling (cpufreq)
* Bluetooth
* backlight control: works, access to all 128 levels. (echo 90 > /sys/devices/platform/omapfb/panel/backlight_level)
* Both the d-pad and the N810 keyboard should work, as well as USB keyboards (thanks to jott!)
* Some power management seems to work
* Sound works fine

What doesn't work:

* Camera (omap24xxcam device) -- would be great to have this! This really shouldn't be too much work to do if someone wants to look at it.

INSTALLATION:
I'll give a brief rundown here, but please see the wiki for more info:
1) Setup boot from SD with fanoush's initfs. (Instructions on how to do this are outside the scope of this thread. Thanks for your understanding.)
2) download and untar the debian beta3 .tar.bz2 onto an ext2/3 partition on your sd card.
3) Use fanoush's bootmenu to boot from it.
4) Enjoy!

QUESTIONS? BUGS? PROBLEMS?
1) Please look at the FAQ on the wiki. first!
2) If you ask a question and get an answer please update the FAQ! Don't worry about formatting, it's more important to have the info somewhere than for it to be pretty. You can even just put the question in the FAQ and link back to the post that answered it.
3) I don't mind answering new questions, but if you have a problem, try and provide as much detail as possible and any relevant logs with your post. This will make it easier to help you.

EDIT: Also, I'm open to requests for screenshots of your favorite app running on Debian. That should be fun. :)

-John

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

Very nice! I'm gonna modify the diablo initfs so I can actually boot from MMC :)

2 questions, I'd like to have a go with the camera but which program for debian shows the video?

Also, does this have framebuffer mod included?

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

Maybe get it to work as a v4l2 device.

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

vlc or mplayer should do the trick. Maybe xawtv?

And yes, this has console-on-framebuffer support, so it will show messages while booting. :) Also, N810 users and N800 users with USB keyboards can get a console and poke around outside of X11.

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

how about general responsiveness of the window manager ?

I like ICEWM/os2008 as it's a lot faster than Hildon/os2008 (KDE/os2008 being the worse) but how is XFCE/debian speed wise ?

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

That looks sweet. Of the 8k apps ported, are there any PIMs installable/usable on there? How about screen size - is the vertical shortness of the screen any issue with XFCE?

Thanks.

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

OK...

So now I need Four installations on my system; Relatively lightweight Chinook internal, heavyweight (development-on-tablet, and apps galore) Chinook, and heavyweight Diablo (now that I have time, and I know about throwing those debs in the cache...), and now... I guess I would be incomplete without Debian. I'm just glad you released today instead of tomorrow when I had everything partitioned...:D (16 GB SD FTW!)

I assume that's the default xfce config? Looks nice and finger-friendly...

Questions:

• xrandr status?
  That is, do we have kernel support? And X server support? (The clients should be trivial, if they aren't already there.)And finally, what does xfce make of rotating while it's running; are the panels at all glitchy, etc.? (I'm going to mess with that after the technical stuff is taken care of anyway, so it really doesn't matter, and that stuff is much easier seen than explained...) It's in the wiki...
• Full-screen?
  Can apps readily be full-screened over the panels? Hardware key-bind in place by default?

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

From wiki:
Unless I misunderstood your question, if so, my apologies in advance.

Seems like I didn't misunderstand ;)

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

Nice work JohnX, XFCE is my favorite Desktop Environment. :cool:

Re: New Debian (beta3) for the N8x0 w/ XFCE
 

The camera is a v4l2 device, at least in OS2008. This means it will work in mplayer (I have it working with Debian mplayer from a chroot) but not in vlc or any other app that can only support v4l. If you got the camera working as a v4l device, that'd be something I'd be very interested in bringing back to Maemo.

Theoretically, the N800's FM radio is supposed to be a v4l device too, but I couldn't get kradio to work with it...

EDIT: Here is a post with a script that sets you up to run Debian apps without rebooting, from Hildon or one of PenguinBait's WMs (KDE, XFCE, etc).