> 2) the required space once the system is installed is now around 319MB,
> which is an improvements since I clearly remember that back in August
> it was more than 350MB
I have my Debian installed in the NAND where it currently says "172MB
used" (of course, this is cheating since the NAND uses jffs2 which
compresses: "du -sx /" tells me 314290). This is after removing xorg
(in favor of xglamo) and installing a few packages like mpd, ario,
dillo, tangogps, linphone, sudo, nmap, zsh, zile.
Some of the config changes I made that I think might be worth making in
the default install:
- enable busybox's syslog daemon. I currently just start "busybox klogd"
and "busybox syslogd -C16" at startup, plus add a symlink "logread ->
busybox".
- Move the ~/.xsession-error messages to the syslog. I don't do that
but my .xsession-errors is currently 4MB and constantly growing.
Of course, maybe the problem is in al those repeated messages I get
there like:
checking for unsent messages
did not receive any unsent messages: org.freesmartphone.GSM.SIM.NotFound:
SimNotFound: org.freesmartphone.GSM.SIM.NotFound:
- install xglamo rather than xorg. It seems this is somewhat
controversial, but I think it makes sense to install the same server
used by the other FR distributions. It also appears to use
less diskspace.
- Make a symlink "/var/lib/apt/lists -> /var/cache/apt/lists"
But more importantly, mount tmpfs over /var/cache/apt. This saves
a good deal of disk space and in my case it also sped up apt-get
update significantly (I was seeing *major* performance problems where
the "gzip" process would take forever (literally: I tried letting it
run for a few hours) to finish; it seemed to be a problem of
horrendously slow write; this was back on the 512MB uSD card,
I haven't tried to reproduce it since moving to the NAND).
The downside of course, is that doing "apt-get update" will eat your
RAM unless you add some swap space. I find it OK: I just get used to
rebooting after installing|upgrading packages.
- Actually IIRC mounting tmpfs over the apt lists area is mandatory on
the NAND because APT uses mmap on those files and jffs2 doesn't
support it (at least, that was the case last time I setup up my
"Debian USB Live" using jffs2).
- install the sftp-server part of openssh-server (it's just 50KB; too
bad Debian currently requires you to install 7MB of files in order to
get it).
- Use a non-root account for the main X11 session. I haven't noticed
any downside, tho it may require some tweaks with sudo, but it makes
it more like a normal Debian system.
> 3) unfortunately, we still need to find a better way to manage some
> configuration files:
> - /etc/X11/xorg.conf
xserver-xglamo would circumvent this problem.
> - /etc/default/rcS
> By default we enable fsck at boot, is this a good thing? I am
> thinking especially about very big (>= 4GB) microSD, where a
> complete fsck can take quite a lot of time
I'd recommend ext3 (or jffs2, obviously).
BTW, among the space savings, I also noticed that the /lib/modules that
came with my Debian install was large (like 50MB) compared to about 5MB
for the /lib/modules that came with my Om2008.9 distribution, so when
I moved to NAND, I decided to use the Om kernel with its 5MB
/lib/modules.
> - /root/.xsession
> This is fundamental and should stay there like this, because
> otherwise at reboot Zhone will not come up
I don't understand: neither root nor my main user has a ~/.xsession file
and I don't remember removing it, nor having to do anything special
to avoid it.
> 4) as you can see in the patch, the fso-config-* package to be installed
> is decided through a new variable, since I intend to merge the Neo
> 1973 script [5] into the main one
BTW, regarding your recent announcement about the risk of breakage upon
upgrade: shouldn't the fso-frameworkd package require a virtual
fso-config package so you can't mistakenly install it without an
appropriate config?
> As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome. If I will not receive
> any big complain, I will commit the attached patch on Sunday at most.
BTW, thank you very much for your work, using Debian on this machine is
really neat and the install.sh script was very helpful for that.
Stefan
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