Page 1 of 1

Debian 8.8 JWM live - Happy Thanksgiving

Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2017 6:27 pm
by quotaholic
File:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1As7i5 ... kQGpoP2MN1

Happy Thanksgiving All

Been working on a new image for a while. One, a friend requested one.
Two Puppy is too old and all newer puppies I have tried are not working well.
Either they wont allow touchscreen to calibrate or buttons do not work once
Xorg starts. So I saw recently that Tomas-M released Slax linux again. He claims its
able to work on i386 hardware however he only offers a PAE kernel so in reality its
more for i686 cpu's. On github though were all of his scripts he used for Slax 9 which
is based on Debian. Thank you Tomas-M, you have enabled this build based on Debian 8.8 - Jessie.

The file offered is a DD image and I recommend that one grabs a copy of puppy that works, a usb hub,
keyboard and mouse and starts puppy with "pfix=nox" and running "xorgwizard" once you are at a prompt.
Once you have graphics working get a terminal up and
"dd if=/dev/sdb1/WebDT-Live-JWM.dd of=/dev/sda"

This assumes that you have uncompressed the file downloaded and put it on the same drive you are booting
puppy with.

DD may take a bit but once done reboot.

This is a first attempt image and the next will be better in some regards.

It seems with an ext4 file system in place this image will save uncompressed folders to a changes directory
on the hard disk. Optimal is the idea of saving changes as compressed modules. Apoligies for this.
It took several attempts to get legacy grub to boot the tablet once the os was transferred and I am
also thinking that newer grub may pass the persisten changes better, another thought is that the filesystem
should be fat 32 to force this next image.

All of the slax utilities are installed. You will find them in a root copy directoy.

dir2sb and savechanges are there. If you install a bit of software I suggest running the
"savechanges" command and directing it to save as a bundle in the modules folder of the hard disk.

I made this image with a virtual machine and debian net install disk. Then ran the linux-live scripts
and made some modifications once installed to the tablet.

My tablet feels like its hanging by a thread and it could be my hardware but hopefully the buttons are reliable
for you. I have some boots where they work and some boots where they do not work. LXDE is scripted to
handle button presses in the /root/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file. Looks for a section commented as
WebDT Bindings

Legacy Grub boots this LXDE based image. You will find the standard apps for lxde installed.
Wicd is the network manager. Could not get blueman working so I kept bluez and am considering bluetooth
as supported. Bluez now has an interactive shell brought up by typing: "bluetoothctl".
Once there you will be able to scan, pair, list, connect, trust and other tasks to connect or pair bluetooth devices.

No penmount drivers are installed. Inputattach and xinput calibrator are all that is needed in a modern kernel
to get the touchscreen piped to the input layer. xinput-calibrator handles the calibration and
right clicking with /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf file. There are a couple of parameters
there one can adjust like right click timeout and pixel threshold.

If you need to make small tweals to files like these consider placing a copy in the /WebDT-Live/rootcopy
directoy on the hard disk. This is the last layer loaded in the live file system and files here will
be the last ones in overwriting anything in their way. To add these files to rootcopy preserve the folder
path. Notice that the folders already have /usr/bin/dir2sb and other apps from slax github repo inside as
an example.

Xinput-calibrator only uses 4 touch points but seems to do a good job.

I may drift twoards making a JWM based image next time around as puppy seems to run faster. That and
I may try to make a devuan (debian without systemd) based image to see if its possible. Seems ram is
at a premium as I only see 4800 free in top while this gui us running.

There are not a lot of creature features in this image. It leaves a little over 220mb free on the
hard disk. It was made on a DT with a 488mb drive inside opposed to the 500mb drive in some models.
So it should work on both sizes. Apt is working and nothing is stopping you from apt-get'ing some
software. Again, I recommend "savechanges /mnt/sda1/WebDT-Live/modules/changes.sb" or depending on
where you mount /dev/sda1.

XVKBD is the onscreen keyboard and I did not write the scripts to make a button toggle but if you
search this forum for "togglekbd.sh" you should be able to find something that works. I had such a hard
time getting my buttons to work on my tablet that most of it is untested but since its sporadic I
am hopefull that its my hardware and not code related. AKa I hope it works for you but if not feel
free to modify. My scrips are in /etc/rc.local where I call the "modprobe atlas_btns" to activate the
kernel driver. Xev is installed to get the associated ketstrokes or keysyms. Take the keycode coming from
Xev and convert it to hex adding 0x to the front. So if first button registers keycode 67, 67 = 43 in hex.
So 0x43 would be the keybind that LXDE would recogzine in the /root/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file.

The installed Web browser is Midori. It only asked for 87mb on top of LXDE. Feel free to remove and add your preferred.

Edit... after relocating across the country again I am still looking for this image however attached is the JWM image I mentioned making at some point.


Happy Holiday!
quotaholic