slitaz Work in progressq

This board posts about running linux on your webdt366
ron85
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slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

Well I got slitaz 3.0 up and running its very fast compared to everything else i've tried. I put in a 256megs cf card and formatted it swap just to be on the safe side but haven't seen much useage infact memory sits around 90megs, got wifi up and working and was surfing the web this am b4 i left for work

now the touch screen is still a work in progress, but I made great progress today, i ahve a vm of my image i've been using to compile software and i just got penmount to compile on slitaz, with depends though its around 600megs to get it to compile....now the fun part..figuring exactly what i'll need to get it to work. now slitaz comes with xvesa by default so the first chore will be to swap out xvesa for xorg, then i believe i'll just need xinputproto and xrandrproto and I should be able to install the package i'm building for penmount, now i had some luck with the debian package took some tweaking of the install script but i got it to detect the touch interface and setup the xorg.conf think the only reason it didn't work was when I was doing that didn't realize it was using xvesa instead of xorg. So i'll do some more experimenting tonight to figure out a good setup and post my results here. slitaz has the capability to create an iso haven't explored it yet but if i get enough time to get something fully working i'll post a link to an iso here if anyone else wants to try it out.

also probably gonna strip out some stuff I don't use. idk really like the way slitaz looks and works, really nice distro

as far as the wifi that comes with the device if you have a recent kernel that works with the wifi just put in on this distro, at least in my experience kernel is pretty easy to move from one distro to the next, specially since after install this is a pretty normal distro /boot and grub legacy, (for instance i'm using a ubuntu xen kernel with my virtualized copy cause the default wasn't working with my wifi)
quotaholic
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by quotaholic »

Nice work ron85!

Yes penmount does require xorg in order to take. Staying with kernel 2.6.32 and down is also needed. Along the way penmount changed the way that they make the drivers and I found out the hardway that they do not support i586 with their newer builds. In the last batch of emails I exchanged with tech support they tried to walk me through using evtouch and libts opposed to their driver. I couldn't get it to work. I have had luck lining up or sometimes getting close with any driver of theirs that lines up with both the kernel version and the xorg version. I use distrowatch to get the nice spreadsheet view of all the distro's and qualify on that. If I remember correctly you need the kernel source package to compile penmount, no? The hardest part is getting a working config without their darn g Cal utility. That was the part where they referred me to libts and evtouch. When g Cal segfaulted each time I tried to use it. Portues linux also offers some neat features as a live / installable distro. A lot of package flexibility too. Anyway congrats on your progress. Its nice to see someone else giving it a shot.

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ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

yeah haven't had much luck past getting it to detect.. have to give it another shot makes since what you said about the version issues going to give it another look
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

Got it working. Fedora 10 Driver
Needs to be manually installed heres a little script to handle that

ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X
Ctrl+Alt+f1
login as root, password root
method i use, connect to wireless with iwconfig (i'm not using the default card using an rt61pci not sure if regular card will work)
set ip with ifconfig
set default gw
#route add default gw (gateway address)
set dns server
#echo nameserver 4.2.2.2 > /etc/resolv.conf
enable #ssh /etc/init.d/dropbox start
set tux password #passwd tux

then do the reset via ssh

ssh tux@ipaddress

$wget http://210.68.130.200/Download/Driver/P ... 4.1.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf PenMount%20Fedora10%20Driver%20V2.4.1.tar.ggz
$cd pmlinux-fedora10
$cp gCal /usr/bin
$cp pm-detect /usr/bin
$cp pm-setup /usr/bin
$cp penmount_drv.so /usr/lib/X11/modules/input
$pm-setup -s
$startx
$gCal
hit the point points and ur done, worked great for me

Oh and a basic install is about 100megs full featured, web everything works great, and has a good package manager
quotaholic
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by quotaholic »

Congratulations on building a working Linux install on your WebDT! That is awesome. Thank you kindly for the how to. May I ask which hardware set you are on? GX - 400mhz w/usb1 or LX - 500mhz w/usb2? I am thinking lx since you mentioned a pci network card. How much of a memory footprint does Slitaz take up while idle?
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

still a work in progress i paid 60 bucks for it on ebay, its usb 1 i believe and a 400 mhz not sure off hand i'll have to run cat /proc/cpuinfo and post the out put for you but i have 256 mem and 512 disk and a 256 cf for swap right now, i am waiting on a 4gig cf but i'm considering putting swap on nfs since hd and cf seem to be piss poor for performance, am getting around 1.5MBytes/second on internal and 900KBytes/sec on cf but its useable

mem is around 100megs under load doesn't touch swap (also working on a buildroot that runs as embedded image in the kernel and runs from memory, haven't been able to get it to post yet to the screen am able to ssh to it so i know its building, only used buildroot on arm devices so not alot of x86 experience with it)
i'm sitting at 150megs of disk usagage but i have been clearing cache as i install packages

I haven't got hardware buttons to registery at all but don't know they work with xev thinking i need penmount kernel modules for those so i'm gonna build a custom kernel, a build enviroment for this distro is about 1g so i'll do it on another machine through a vm.

working on a couple things, want to compile zsnes or figure out a distro that has some compatibility so far i've just been manually grabing bin and lib files from debian and trying to force them to work, having decent luck, gCal works on stock though so that good

another thing is xorg-xf86-driver-video-geode doesn't work its just white with blurry colors, so thats a work in progress too

also xvkbd doesn't work either i posted on the slitaz forum hoping someone has a fix, but thinking i might have to recompile xorg and all its modules to get the above things working in addtion to redoing the kernel, theirs a doc I read through on the slitaz handbook on how they recommend kernel compiling i'll probably also specify geode as the processor when I compile so its optimised, but with vesa driver gui is slogish since its all going through the cpu so wanna get that fixed, but all and all it works well very surprised considering the results of hdparm on the storage media

also contemplating figuring a way to run it all through nfs, haven't benched the network to see if I get full bandwidth on the pcmia slot but gonna look into that, might end up just loading etherboot to the disk then doing like ltsp for a full on kde 4 or gnome 3 enviroment on this thing and just throwing a gigabit ethernet pcmia card in it, and running the cable to where i have it mounted on the wall in the living room

these things are awesome though i like the feel of the units extremely solid, it was shipped to me in an envelope lol
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

So I'll next be looking at figureing out a way to improve performance, does anyone know how the pcimia slot is wired? does it get full bandwidth, not formilar with the standard off hand know pci is something like 1024MBps not sure about PCMIA II 32-bit interface but imagine its also 1024MBps (32bit?) but gonna look at etherboot and what chipsets are supported and might order a chip wifi card thats compatibile off ebay and see if i can get either nfs or iscsi setup, never done iscsi over wifi but my xen server and router are powerful enough think i could create a seperate logical network and put wifi on it would have no problem saturating a 802.11G connection with bandwidth, thinking i could get a 15x improvement on io performance, get the geode driver working and free up some cpu and i'd be running nicely. idk
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

and of course the other option is a cf card that is also a 802.11g card going through the pcmia slot, not sure on performance on those either but have to imagine is better then 1MB/s
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by quotaholic »

Ahh, Hardware buttons require the atlas_btn driver in the kernel. Possibly a "modprobe atlas_btn". At that point they come through as acpi events, which xev will see and loop through the xorg input layer. I used to use an app called evrouter to see which event layer they were hitting. PCMCIA is not well supported. From memory I remember seeing double digit mhz speeds but don't quote me on that. I think an intel chip acts as the bridge on that one. I grabbed a Cisco g series pcmcia card and that worked well with my GX unit. There are tight clearances for cards that will stick out of the top like most all g series cards do. Watch those clearances. Basically the whole GX series unit runs on usb1.1 and not much speed is available. Some members here have used a CF card and symlinked a bunch of their hd payload off to it. Just don't move anything that is required for booting. Another thought on speed is going with an aftermarket horizontal 44 pin ide disk on module. The transcend I modded in to mine got me some appreciable speed increases. NFS would work well on a faster card but most live distros I have seen running from ram do take valuable memory and slow things up a tad. 256 is not a lot when talking about xorg. I took a look last night and saw that Slitax cooking lines up well with a Suse kernel/xorg from penmount. Tempting but I just received an ipad this morning that I needed for programming a home automation system and ipad control. About a year ago I had slackware running on one with a 2.6.37 kernel and somehow got an ubuntu driver to work. Xorg - Geode video driver works on LX hardware (with bugs) however I could never get it to work on GX series hardware. Seems AMD lost their primary geode developer and as such the open source community suffered. What kind of error do you see on xvkbd? From memory there were three dependencies. LibXaw3, libxtst and libxext.

Hope it helps
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

yeah atlas button wasn't in the kernel config so did a zcat /proc/config.gz > /usr/src/linux/.config and added a few modules, noticed they most of gone through and manually deleted stuff so half ass optimised it for the dt366 put in the geode processor and took out some drivers i knew wouldn't be part of the system not sure if I took out too much will find out tomorrow but lsmod gave me a good idea of what M's i could remove left all the * cause i'm not sure how to tell which kernel compiled drivers are in use, be a good thing to know, be nice to have a command that generates a .config of the bare minimum you need to run ur system as is, so would only have to add on what is missing.....anyone know of one?
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

after running some more benchmarks, as far as i can tell the pcmia II slot is full bandwidth, its faster then the hd, but not much, also noticed a plane old usb drive i had laying around was around 100x faster then the internal drive...so thinking what i'm going to do now is order a pcmcia II usb card and put a thumb drive and a usb wifi card on it, then just have /boot on the internal drive and / on the usb, be easy to install any distro at that point, but still going for slitaz cause of the speed, will run much smoother, was playing around with it, was able to play music and the included player has a speed bar and was able to drag the song to get it to play in reverse and then forward again, pretty impressed with the performance of this considering the benchmark data i've gotten so far.

with the above features added could get a very usable device out of this. espitmating around 20MB/s instead of 1.5 and 60Mbps instead of 20Mbps on network (i put a g card in it, after signal and encryption only getting 20ish mpbs on laptops and on the dt366, so its gettings normal marks there which leads me to believe full bandwidth on pcmia II) at worse i'm out 15 bucks, or have extra usb ports on my laptop
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

got kernel recompiled and optimized for the geode, then downloaded latest source for geode driver (used debian package search and grabbed the original search .tag.gz) compiled it in my build enviroment and loaded it on, had to f with the xorg.conf to get the resolution right, but saw signficant performance increase, so everything is working now, realizing the hw limitations i took some atom boxes and hooked em up to different stereos, then have some keys in place, also wrote a little c program to monitor a file, so i have 1 button to reset x and 1 for the keyboard and 2 for sterio systems and 1 for terminal, works really well, might put together a how to and share my kernel and binaries, but everythign works, plenty of free mem and hd space, about 50/50 each and this is at load, idle (with x and openbox) is around 68megs of memory, i have a crap load of software installed and sitting around 360 megs of disk useage, boot time is measured in slitaz and after some optimising i am in at 15s from grub to ssh wifi and x start, x restarts take about 3 seconds, so its a very sharp little device now
ron85
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by ron85 »

current state, work in progress, but here are some videos of the thing in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8i6dum ... LHhKfBB8gB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7dC2dUj ... YBrLKnPZt6
quotaholic
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by quotaholic »

I really should have tried this earlier. Thank you ron85.

Cant say enough about Slitaz. Rumors are that it was forked from DSL Linux. Cant say enough about the tools they incorporate. I have it installed to the tablet now and am 4 days in to testing it out. Big moment is testing saves on live os. Slitaz is tiny and if you look in to their ISO files they look empty.

Slitaz uses a unique method of booting that slows things down but we can fit a lot more. The root file system is located in the initrd as a highly compresses gzip file. Thus when we boot we see the syslinux splash screen but then the tablet goes dark for a couple minutes while it decompresses in to ram. It may actually take longer to boot than puppy but that being said its lightning fast in compatison.

We have a working Geode video driver on Slitaz!

I grabbed (mirror) their v3 core iso. Core is a flavor. Its a full desktop. Put v3-core in to a vm and didnt even install it. I just run it live in 8GB ram in VM.

Look in to their tools. tazlito makes live iso files and we can adjust package lists. tazusb makes live installs possible. tausb also has writefs which saves session to hdd or usb depending on where installed (ext3 dependent).

Fedora 10 driver from penmount covers the touchscreen but dont try to use their script. Use Ron85’s method above.

In the VM we need set up on strict Linux 2.x/3.x/4.x in virtualbox. I also had to bridge network adapter.

Slitaz default user is tux with a password of tux. Root user is the same with password. root and root. Get in to a shell once this far and get to root user.
(in vm)
tazpkg get-install slitaz-toolchain
tazpkg get-install perl
tazpkg get-install ncurses-dev
tazpkg get-install linux-source

i will upload my config file for geode specific kernel soon. typing from ipad. it came out to 7.5mb with modules and compressed.

if you want to do yourself:

cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.30.6

make menuconfig
here use / to search

we have airo, atlas_btns, geode, cs5535 and cs5536 to find and enable. search out penmount too. make sure event interface is a module (evdev).
I drop all video drivers and enable acpi fixes for single processor cpu. Also via vt6656 if its there, usually staging, Those are the important ones. Once its set:

make bzImage && make modules
make tazpkg
this will put a linux-2.6.30.6-slitaz.taxpkg or similar in the kernel directory. Copy it to tux user directory.

cp linux-2.6.30.7-slitaz.tazpkg /home/tux/

now lets build
cd /home/tux

mkdir distro
cd distro
tazlito list-flavors
tazlita get-flavor core
tazlito extract-flavor core
nano tazlito.cong

here change lines to match /home/tux/distro/

for working directory. Notice the last line does not need editing as its based on the second line. adjust first and second directory.

*** you could do what i did here and make folder structure as:

/home/tux/distro/flavors/core
/home/tux/distro/flavors/justx

if you do this cd in to the /home/tux/distro/flavors/core directory before issing the first tazlito command.

Once the tazlito config file aims at the directory, one tazlito config for each flavor in the flavor name folder, issue

nano distro-packages.conf

Get a browser open and google; slitaz search

get to their packages search page drop down the menu for version and get on version 3. Search out each package you intend to install as we need to place version numbers. I add the following:

acpid-1.0.10
bluez-4.xx
xorg-xf86-video-geode-2.10.1
xorg-xinput.1.3.0
xvkbd-3.1
xdotool-20090126
xf86-free-fonts

I usually remove a package called suggested-applications anf gettext and thats about it.

tazlito gen-distro

hit enter twice

This amazing tool downloads all compressed packages in to a /home/tux/distro/packages

or

/home/tux/distro/flavors/core/distro/packages

directory. This is good! Expect it to hiccup on midori, this is perfect.

nano distro-packages.conf and use browser to get current version. 0.3.2 from memory. Now copy in custom kernel with something like:

cp -R /usr/src/linux-2.6.30.6.tazpkg /home/tux/distro/packages/linux-2.6.30.6.tazpkg

tazlito clean-distro
tazlito gen-distro

watch it make tiny iso. Figure out how to copy out of vm. I installed gftp so i could copy to NAS.

I saved the vm with slitaz v3 and opened win10vm.

On windows 10 vm I use lili linux loader old version 2.0 to install to usb2.0 drive. I have bad luck over 8gb. 2gb usb2.0 work best.

Boot tablet to lili prepared drive. At Slitaz menu hit f5 and f6 to see options. We will use:

slitaz screen=text vga=788 lang=en kmap=us acpi=force

This will get you cursor many minutes later. Issue:

X -configure

nano /root/xorg.conf.new

In device section for gpu:

Identifier “AMD Geode”
Option “FBSize” “8388608”
Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
Option “PanelGeometry” “800x600”

go down one section and change “card0” for “AMD Geode”

save with ctl+o

do not test!

On usb drive bring in penmount fedora 10 driver and follow ron85’s above instructions up to startx. Dont. we will have to reboot and start over if you do. Trust me!

On the second usb put copy of iso file you made and used, insert in to hub. use dmesg to find it: /dev/sda1 for example. Mount it on mnt. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Put save capable filesystem on webdt internal flash: mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 *this will erase internal flash!

tazusb gen-iso2usb /mnt/slitaz-xxxxx.iso /dev/hda1

this will take a bit. reboot

We may have to enter this with our original safe boot mode:

slitaz screen=text vga=788 lang=en kmap=us acpi=force

redo xorg if needed with X -configue
add geode specifics. save. I found that penmount pm-setup reset my xorg.conf and i had to redo all changes.

cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/x11/xorg.conf

/etc/init.d/slim start

if xorg.conf is good you will see a desktop in 30-45 seconds.

get penmount setup if it didnt carry over for some reason. Start penmount without x running as ron85 examples. Reboot to get there if needed. Redo xorg.conf if needed.

Once you have working touchscreen on desktop issue in xterm...

tazusb writefs gzip /dev/sda1 if on usb
tazusb writefs gzip /dev/hda1 if installed (my kernel identified /dev/hda, yours may not. follow prompts. If you are paranoid on avail ram reboot and do without xserver running. You will need to redo penmount after installed. If you screw up and forget compression you can delete it and start over. I just did and am taking opportunity to test lzma.

Whats neat about saving changes with tazusb is that it keeps a backupnof the old rootfs, previous.gz. If needed one can edit boot command in syslinux splash and aim towards previous.

penmount is a pita. We need an xorg.conf in place for it to write changes but it will reset the file so its probably better to wait until this point to do initial edits to xorg.conf

That will take a bit to finish. Reboot without and usb sticks in. Just keyboard / mouse. Get to root prompt.

to be cautionary issue:

cat /etcX11/xorg.conf and make sure its where it was when last we edited. If so:

/etc/init.d/slim start

This is where i currently am. Hoping to peg buttons and suspend soon and upload an image.

*note. while testing images make sure to add
:

module-init-tools
depmod

to your builds. They use compressed kernel modules in Slitaz so without those no drivers load due to kernel not having the knowledge upon how to work with modules in .gz format

Turns out after making iso and installing it one may find their modules in a format that init does not like. Errors on ...ko.gz format.

Be careful at this point. It takes 15-20 minutes to save current file system to disk with the tazusb writefs gzip /dev/hda1 command. It took me half the morning to straighten out one bug in my xorg.conf. Reboot to test that and now I just ran depmod as root to hopefully fix module symbols for next init but before I can test I need to: tazusb writefs gzip /dev/ha1

I did try lzma instead of gzip but didnt have enough ram for it to finish. tazusb can set up a swap and I may look in to that once I can get this tablet booting to a gui reliably and consistently. From memory lzma decompresses faster and it may help with boot times. At this point I have like 345mb free on internal flash drive. Boot times should be around 2 to 2.5 minutes once I get there.
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Re: slitaz Work in progressq

Post by quotaholic »

So far,

Not booting to desktop. Need to clean up syslinux conf files. It may make this english_us specific on boot though. Looking for alternate approach.
xvkbd complains about no usable fonts but other locale issues seem to be amidst. xvkbd wont even start. Screenshot shows a save action after setting utf8.
at present xvkbd indicates it cant find iso8859 fonts. IFIRC this makes ncurses apps look like an ascii virus hi them.

Worse of all somehow the last few modules to compile in my kernel have somehow been corrupted. Anything sound related, last to compile in kernel, wont pass depmod and on boot get flagged as being in an invalid format.

Slitaz rocks as its faster than anything ive seen on these tablets. That being said its just too easy to paint yourself in to a corner when building. I fear if the iso file gets larger than 40 some mb it will fill ram too much and saving wont execute. We can make swap space and that should help. ron85 said he was around 90 on swap so possibly 100mb, much like puppy, is due. ron85 was soo right on the geode video driver being needed to make the hardware humanly usable. He did not mention that one also needs to, when installing the penmount fedora 10 driver, that one should also copy gPen application to either /usr/bin or /usr/sbin. The gPen app allows one to set mouse mode to the penmount driver which enables a cursor that moves if you drag the stylus across the screen. On default install the penmount driver acts like a pointing device and only recognizes taps. No cursor drags.

Anyway. getting closer. This is old linux but this is also old hardware. With Slitaz v3 bluez will be accessible through the terminal as blueman didnt hit their distro until v4. Think I found a non invasive (window manager config file) way to make buttons work with python and cant wait to test but not until foundations are stronger. It’ll be a late night but I will start over after dinner.

It takes 15-20 min to save but once installed it takes 2 min to boot. At this stage debugging is taking days and starting with working kernel (sound) is mandatory. I’m active on slitaz forums if interested and in the end i may take their scratch method in to consideration as their v4 also ups to a version of syslinux that will not boot the hardware, eg syslinux-4.05. In v3 we have syslinux-3.82. One of the last versions that were capable of booting the webdt hardware. At their advice I need to move to v5 and “cook” my own hybrid. If anyone beats me post it to slitaz forums.
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