Raspberry Pi

[mimosa]

@laprjns Thanks for the link.

I now have xmonad instead of lxde/openbox; it works perfectly and feels faster. Next step will be to build vimprobable (which isn't in the Debian ARM repos).

Xmonad works out of the box (with dmenu) whereas Ratpoison would need some tweaking to be comfortable. It goes to show the care Gapan put into the Salix Ratpoison edition.

I still haven't had any luck on the multimedia front, but since I don't propose to actually retire my 64-bit machine in favour of the cigarette-packet sized Pi , it's not the end of the world. It would be really cool though (video, YouTube), and maybe it'll be possible with a Salix-based system, once I get that far. Meanwhile, I am rather enjoying the breadth of the Debian repos.

[ibka]

I tried to use http://stanleygarvey.com/Slackberry/Sla ... 121201.zip but got kernel panic. After long time of searching i found that the SD card i have is slightly smaller than the img and therefor the file system gets corrupted.
I finally after a long time got Slackware Arm installed on my Raspberry Pi.
I used the method to install it from this site http://rpi.fatdog.eu/
I then installed lxde from http://slackware.spit-ct.ro/raspberrypi/

[mimosa]

Thank you for those links and info, ibka.

If the trouble is just that the image is slightly too large, and given that it will be mostly empty space, it occurred to me it shouldn't be too difficult to shrink it.

I looked at this thread for inspiration:

http://www.salixos.org/forum/viewtopic. ... unt#p17840

but in that case the images are of filesystems, whereas this is a disk image containing two or more partitions each containing a filesystem. So the image as a whole cannot be mounted and shrunk.

I'll root around, but does anyone know off the top of their head how to go about this? Something like isomaster (or whatever console tools it uses)?

EDIT

Just found this, with instructions on how to chroot into the install inside the image file. It doesn't solve the resizing problem (though the part about partition offsets looks as though it has potential) but it looks useful in its own right. Maybe it would even be possible to do an install like that (a lot faster):

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/qu ... g-an-image

In a nutshell, fdisk -lu Slack.img gives you the start points of the partitions. Multiply by the unit size (probably 512) to convert to bytes, and that's your offset. Then do something like this:

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# mount -o loop,offset=449970176 ./SlackwareArm-14.0-8GB-20121201.img /tmp/slacking/

That webpage refers to Raspbian or whatever, but the principle is the same. I was able to mount the partitions within the ARMed SLack image, but not access them unmounted using losetup.

PS Simply:

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#gparted Slack.img

sees everything, and will delete or resize swap, but for some reason e2fsckprogs (or whatever it's called) can't successfully manipulate the main partition. I thought it was a bad idea to put swap on an SD card, but anyway ...

[mimosa]

It occurred to me that there is no need to bother with shrinking filesystem, partition, image. I just repartitioned the SD card with gparted and copied the files from the existing image. The important work was already done - mounting the partitions within the image.

Everything appears to work, though in the spirit of vanilla Slackware, all configuration is left as an exercise for the user. That makes me appreciate Salix all the more. The temporary user I created was unable to start X, but I think it needs to be added to some groups first.

Sadly, when I tested the Slackberry card, I discovered that one of my cats (yes Leãozinho, I know it was you) had quartered my Pi (which I left amid its usual pile of spaghetti), pulling the ethernet socket adrift and destroying the USB hub. The Pi itself appears to be undamaged (the ethernet socket went back in easily once I removed its metal casing). The screen goes blank after a minute or so if there is no keyboard or mouse activity, but my hunch is that's something to do with vanilla Slackware, not a cat-generated hardware defect.

[jayseye]

To check the current value: setterm -blank

The man page has a lot of detail and related options.

[mimosa]

Crux on Pi:

http://crux-arm.nu/SupportedDevices/Raspberrypi

Crux is not for the fainthearted (or so I've heard ) but I bet it would be fast. With a device like this, performance really matters.

Having said that, it's not bad with Raspbian and a light setup (XMonad, surf, st, alpine, pyroom ...) Just still can't get any video or flash.

I look forward to getting to grips with ARMedSalix when I have time.

[gapan]

Just still can't get any video or flash.

omxplayer works fine, what else do you need?

You'll never get flash working, but you can easily view youtube videos. You just need youtube-dl.

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omxplayer $( youtube-dl -g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOURVIDEOHERE )

There's also yt (whitey). I've made a fork in github in which I've added configuration through a configuration file.
https://github.com/gapan/yt

yt also fits nicely with Ratpoison and Salix (using mplayer).

[mimosa]

Thanks for those. I'll try them when I get a bit further with Salixberry

[gapan]

No, I mean with raspbian. I doubt you can get omxplayer to work in slackware-arm.

[mimosa]

Meanwhile, searching suggests that at least in some cases WiFi may fail because of insufficient power. I don't have a working hub now (nor ethernet) but just ordered a replacement. Or maybe I just need to remove NetworkManager.

It appears I'm not the first person whose Pi was crucified by a cat playing with the wires. It's a tempting idea to put the whole lot in a custom perspex box (like ORAC in Blake's Seven - Google before it was invented).

Slackberry's firmware can be supplemented from a Salix installation's /lib/firmware.