[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Conclusions from the constantly rebooting issue

[From: Rainer Dorsch]

Hello,

I recently got my 770, upgraded to the OS2006 image and tried for two days 
several things, among them integration into a bluetooth piconet, gizmo, 
installing dropbear, fbreader, setting up email, my mailserver to support the 
770 supported send protocols, and minor apps.

I was about to try video encoding for the 770, gaim, and setting up backup 
when I hit the "constantly rebooting issue". Now I am waiting for my new USB 
dke-2 cable which I lost :-(

I decided to flash the 770 and start over again, not an uncommon or unpleasant 
thing for a device I am new to, as long I do not have to do that frequently, 
preferably I would have to do at most one more :-)

I though, I share my thoughts what to do, maybe a developer or a more 
experienced user, can help to avoid mistakes and save me one or more flash 
cycles.

1.To integrate the 770 into a bluetooth piconet, I need to load the bnep 
kernel module, start pand, and run udhcpc. I need root access for that. 

2. I install Osso Xterm (from http://maemo-hackers.org/apt/)  and dropbear 
ssh. Is that the xterm flavour which broke the 770 during the maemo launcher 
upgrade?


3. Enable root access as described in
 http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowDoiBecomeRoot2 

I go for a passwordless su entry in sudoers, I was somewhat scared of "Note 
that if you require a password to become sudo, some built-in apps (notably 
Application Manager) will appear to not load while they wait silently in the 
background for the password to be entered." because I do not fully understand 
what is meant. Could this affect Application Manager when started from the 
GUI for example?

4. I would add some repositories in sources list. I think repositories are a 
good thing as long as they are well maintained. I prefer a repository per 
app, or a preferences mechanism, like backports has. On the other hand, if 
the repositories are purely well tested and interfer with system packages, I 
don't want to have them.

I want to add
	   http://maemo-hackers.org/apt/
   to sources.list to see updates for the osso term, if available. The version 
I used, handwriting recognition did not work well, though not sure which 
version this was. Also I saw, it has gaim.

   The FBreader repository was broken, when I tried last time (probably 
Packages file not uptodate):
     http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/
   Is there anybody who could fix that?

  I think I saw the maemo-launcher and gstreamer updates from
	  http://repository.maemo.org/
 What are the updates good for? 

People report the gstreamer update is working again and if I understand 
correctly, the maemo-launcher update would work, when applied with the red 
pill mode within the application manager. 

I tend to leave that one away, given the warning in 
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationRepositories

5. In understood that application manager updates only user applications. One 
thing which is completely unclear to me is, how does Nokia provide system 
updates in case of serious bugs in the system? 

6. There is no repository for gizmo, so manually install that one....

7. I assmue extending the root file system as described in
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ExtendedRootFilesystem
can be done at any time later. Any thoughts on the impact on life expancy?

8. On a PC based system, it is sometimes handy to be able to boot the system 
from a clean CD and fix whatever is broken in the normal system.  Would 
booting the root device from mmc as described
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowTo_BootRootFSFromMMC
help here?


Many thanks for reading that for any comments are welcome,
Rainer

-- 
Rainer Dorsch
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