The Intimate Project

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Include a tool to partition the disk in the installtools archive. - Dave

*The disk partitioning tools are now included in the lastest installtools archive. - Tangent 23/030/01

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Is this going to be apt based? That would rock. Then, when I decide I don't need say, java, I could let apt remove all the java dependancies that weren't needed by anything else. - Dave

*The distribution is apt based already. - Tangent 23/03/01

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Are you planning any form of compression? 340MB just doesn't go as far as it used to ;-) gzexe helps a lot for apps. Most large files, like multimedia files, are already compressed (mp3, jpg, etc.). Is there anyway of compressing, say, library files? -Dave

*gzexe is already included in the image. We need someone to write mtd emulation support for IDE devices, then we can use JFFS2. All the other compressed filesystems (i.e. ext2compr) seem to have died.- Tangent 23/01/01

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Are you working with the "Familiar" people? I know they are talking about setting up a base distro and then everything else would be in packages. This sounds a lot like that. - Dave

*There are three goals behind the Intimate project. 1.) To get support for booting from CF/network included in the familiar images. 2.) To get people making iPAQ specific .debs for packages customised for the iPAQ. This fits with the goals of both familiar and intimate. 3.) To provide a complete pre-configured linux system that doens't need a serial console to configure it. - Tangent 23/03/01

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Since this is udrive based, what are you planning to put in flash? I would suggest the basics, enough to get the system up without the udrive, after that, stuff that doesn't change much to fill the rest.

*The plan is to let Familiar handle the flash distribution, and intimate could deal with full blown filesystems... The same images can be used as an NFSroot? as well as udrive images. Ideally I'd like to have a useable iPAQ without needing the udrive plugged in, as I like to browse the web via 802.11 - Tangent 23/03/01

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RE: last point - I think it is quite good the way you currently have it - ie boot without microdrive and you get familiar. Boot with microdrive and you have intimate. This means you can enjoy the benefits of both systems without reinstalling every time. It also means you can use Familiar as a rescue system - perhaps the install-tools could be split into boot-utils (everything required to boot into Intimate), cftools (everything needed to manage and format compact flash partitions) and rescue-tools (additional items to fix a messed up Intimate drive - hint: vi.) - Dave.

*A very good idea. I'll split the installtools archive soon. Thanks. - Tangent 23/03/01

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I would like to see some form of login management, so that I don't have to work as root all the time. Ideally, waking up from suspend/coming back from screen saver would also require a password. Perhaps this is already work in progress in Familiar? - Dave.

*Been thinking much the same thing myself. Looking for options. - Tangent 23/03/01

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Still can't find fdisk (or similar). What is the name of the latest installtools archive? Could you call it installtools-latest.tgz so the link always works?

The link already was up to date... I updated it when I added fdisk to the installtools on 25/03/01. Tangent

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Will it be possible to reduce the size of the ramfs? Move most of what is in ramfs onto the udrive, add 64MB of udrive swap and you have enough ram to run about anything.

*ramfs is dynamically sized depending on contents. - Tangent 25/03/01

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For people who may want to run Familiar now and then as well as Intimate, configuring two systems independently is cumbersome. How feasible would it be to use symlinks on the drive to configuration files in the flash? Obviously it wouldn't be applicable for all configuration files. I'm thinking of things like /etc/passwd. - Dave. Doh - Forgot you can't symlink across mount-points!

Can't symlink across mount points? Are you sure? Actually, I looked into trying to use bits from familiar in flash within intimate when I was trying to squeeze everything onto 64Mb CF... I just gave up in the end - Tangent

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Is it possible to get the status bar in blackbox to go vertically rather than horizontally? - it takes up a lot of space at the moment. - Dave.

(This is more a blackbox question. I was thinking the same thing, though.) - Tangent

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Some things which seem to be missing which surprised me - tclsh, wish and man. I know the man pages take up a lot of space, but it would be very useful to have at least man dpkg, man dselect and man apt available as a starting point for those of us who haven't used Debian before. ...or maybe add them to a help menu in blackbox. - Dave. PS: there are a few stray man pages hanging off the root directory.

Hmmm... Yes... man is missing, and that's all my fault... After a couple of long hard days, building intimate, I couldn't manage to get man to work... It kept complaining that it couldn't create a tempfile, but I never managed to work out why... I decided to uninstall it, and let someone else work it out when they installed... My Bad... Tangent? 29/03/01

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Would be nice to have PPP set up as per Familiar (except for the missing lines in /etc/modules.) Currently struggling to get it working - the how-to doesn't seem to work very well with Intimate. - Dave.

Jacques: Do you fancy contributing your PPP setup? You've got all this working. - Tangent 29/03/01

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For some reason df doesn't seem to know about the jffs2 image mounted on /boot. Is there a fix for this or is this normal behaviour? - Dave.

The df command checks /etc/mtab to see what's mounted... If it checked /proc/mounts instead, it'd find that it was mounted... Adding a line to /etc/mtab should fix it... I'm not sure why it's not added when jffs2 gets mounted (Maybe / is still RO at the time?) - Tangent 29/03/01

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Do you need gzexe versions of xmame, xgb and snes9x for the distro? Let me know if you do. Tom Kirksey

Tom.. Thanks for the offer... gzexe is on the intimate distribution, so making them is trivial... (I already gzexe'd the ones that are there.) Thanks. - Tangent 29/03/01

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Just how much space does Intimate take up? For a 340MB udrive, I get 340mb - 234MB (base) - 64MB (swap) = 42MB left for data.

If you strip it down to a raw debian base, with no x-server etc, then it gets down to about 45Mb, but it's no fun then... You can get rid of all the stuff from /usr/local/ but again... not too much fun... Just pick and choose what you want with dselect - Tangent 29/03/01

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