Debian is a bust, moving to Hackable1 distro

As the title states, Debian on Freerunner was a bust. It ran really slow in NAND, in fact, NAND turns out to be too small to run a decent distro with a full load out of tools. I installed Hackable (a variant of Debian for developers) onto NAND but then ran out of space when I started to add packages. So then I installed it onto my 16GB SD card and have begun to install packages to add functionality. Here is a list of packages installed so far:

Packages installed for Hackable1

1. First, apt-get install update and apt-get install upgrade

2. apt-get install perl (for building other packages)

3. apt-get install gcc

4. apt-get install busybox (for ifconfig and others)

5. apt-get install quagga (routing)

6. apt-get install ethtool

7. apt-get install binutils

8. apt-get install jamvm (Java virtual machine)

9. apt-get install linphone (VOIP software for linux) (as of 28 July not working)

10. apt-get install twinkle (same as above)

I've tried hooking up the USB to Ethernet adapter to the phone and have had no luck so far. When I switch the OpenMoko to host mode I get the blue LED on the Ethernet adapter, however the Phone does not recognize the adapter. I can not ping from the phone to my Netbook through the adapter. I've begun investigating Quagga and Ethtool to see if some additional configuration is needed to get the adapter to route traffic. When I plug the adapter into my Netbook running OpenSUSE 11.2 it recognized it immediately and assigns it an interface name (Eth3). No such luck upon plugging it into the phone.

Open Moko NeoFR configuration and development

Quick Recap

OK, so I've had the NeoFR's for a few months now and have learned some really tough lessons. Most recently, concerning Android: It works great out of the box for the FR as a usable phone, however it is worthless to me since you can't access the USB port. This may be helpful down the line in my thesis when I touch on the subject of security, but for now establishing a connection with the Radio is of paramount importance.

Things I've learned: You need 2 main files for the FreeRunner: a root file system and kernel. These can either be installed on the SD card or into NAND memory (AKA: Flash). The rfs files can be downloaded directly or as a tarball and unzipped onto either the SD card or into NAND. If you put a rootfs and kernel on the SD card, you can boot into NOR (hold AUX, then press power) and boot into whatever distribution you have on the SD. THIS WILL NOT INSTALL THE DISTRO. Some distros come with an installation script, which can wipe out your SD card so it is important to backup the SD card before using an installation script. To backup the SD card use:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 | ssh user@backup.server "gzip -9 > sdcard.gz"

This will create a compressed backup of your card performing the compression on the backup server (assuming that it's more powerful than 400MHz). To restore, run the following from your backup server:

zcat sdcard.gz | ssh root@freerunner.address dd of=/dev/mmcblk0

This is from the DebianOnFreerunner wiki. I have decided to load Debian using their install script (install.sh). So now I am backing up the SD card which contains a vanilla OM2009 image that I copied over after removing Android.