Aura HD Debian for Aura HD

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by tigran

Thank you, Jim. But it seems to be absolutely impossible to download the image from China. I retried about a dozen times over the past 8 days and always failed. So, I assume that nobody outside China ever tried this...

Actually, Mozilla Firefox may be a better choice for such "non-wget"-able urls, I'll see if it can retry and resume the download (Chrome cannot do this)

Sorry about that, But there is no better online drive I can use in China.
Can't you user BaiDuYun Cient?

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by JimMcLaren

This is my understanding.

• The boot menu will display a short boot menu on the screen with one of the buttons defaulted. If you do nothing it will boot into that choice. This is configurable from within Debian.
• There is no boot menu displayed. You just tap different parts of the screen to select your OS to boot into. Again, if you do nothing it will start the default OS.

I use the boot menu and have it configured to start into Kobo. IIRC, the default is Debian.

YES, There is no boot menu displayed, that is the only difference.

Some kind of HD do not support showing boot menu, so i release a no boot menu version

[guang6321]

New image is out!
New features:
Debian/Android Dualboot in one SD card;
WiFi auto-connecting;
manetic cover sleeping;
Long-Press Light button to show/hide the tool bar;

Some new softwares: Iceape ,Liferea,Osmo...

System/source codes/guides：
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1jG44Mxw

[downeaster59]

This looks very interesting. What version of Android do you use? I currently have Gingerbread (2.3.4) running off my SD card from an older hack.

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by downeaster59

This looks very interesting. What version of Android do you use? I currently have Gingerbread (2.3.4) running off my SD card from an older hack.

It is still Gingerbread now, I just copied the old hack system

[JimMcLaren]

Originally Posted by guang6321

New image is out!
New features:
Debian/Android Dualboot in one SD card;
WiFi auto-connecting;
manetic cover sleeping;
Long-Press Light button to show/hide the tool bar;

Some new softwares: Iceape ,Liferea,Osmo...

System/source codes/guides：
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1jG44Mxw

This is very cool. Much thanks. I had to download it twice but didn't have near the problems I had last time. The download speeds were very reasonable. I've got it installed with all 3 OSs. Great work. I haven't been able to get wifi working yet but I'll keep trying.

[tigran]

Thank you very much, I have installed it and everything (including WiFi) seems to be working fine.

Thanks again for this wonderful work --- now my Kobo Aura HD is active again (while Kobo Aura H2O is mainly used for reading).

UPDATE: How do I reduce the font size for the terminal? Normally I like large font sizes but on this screen size it is better to make it slightly smaller.

UPDATE: I have a question: is it safe to clone this whole environment into a larger size card (e.g. 64GB or 128GB) by duplicating all the layout except making a larger sixth partition which would result in the same system but bigger rootfs? I hope so, I'll try it now. It is a shame to waste 64GB or 128GB cards by using only 16GB out of them.

UPDATE: Yes, cloning works fine! So you can use this system with a lot more free storage than is provided in the 16GB image...

WONDERFUL, absolutely fantastic piece of work! Thank you VERY MUCH, friend!

[tigran]

How do I add StarDict dictionaries and remove the existing Chinese ones? When I click on the "Settings" icon in StarDict application, nothing happens. I see there are some .cfg files in ~/.stardict directory but they seem to be binary, i.e. shouldn't be edited by hand.

It would be nice to be able to add/remove StarDict dictionaries in this environment.

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by tigran

How do I add StarDict dictionaries and remove the existing Chinese ones? When I click on the "Settings" icon in StarDict application, nothing happens. I see there are some .cfg files in ~/.stardict directory but they seem to be binary, i.e. shouldn't be edited by hand.

It would be nice to be able to add/remove StarDict dictionaries in this environment.

Hi tigran, you can connect your kobo to computer, the dictionaries are in sd card "dict" directory. The fonts and dict directories are located in "/mnt/sd/" in Kobo.
For terminal font size setting, you should do long press in terminal window, then choose option->profiles page

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by tigran

Thank you very much, I have installed it and everything (including WiFi) seems to be working fine.

Thanks again for this wonderful work --- now my Kobo Aura HD is active again (while Kobo Aura H2O is mainly used for reading).

UPDATE: How do I reduce the font size for the terminal? Normally I like large font sizes but on this screen size it is better to make it slightly smaller.

UPDATE: I have a question: is it safe to clone this whole environment into a larger size card (e.g. 64GB or 128GB) by duplicating all the layout except making a larger sixth partition which would result in the same system but bigger rootfs? I hope so, I'll try it now. It is a shame to waste 64GB or 128GB cards by using only 16GB out of them.

UPDATE: Yes, cloning works fine! So you can use this system with a lot more free storage than is provided in the 16GB image...

WONDERFUL, absolutely fantastic piece of work! Thank you VERY MUCH, friend!

Glad to see you done these

[tigran]

Thank you for answering my questions.

On the UXTerm size --- I figured out I need to edit ~/.Xdefaults file (just like in my younger days).

On stardict --- I figured out I need to edit ~/.stardict/stardict.cfg --- it is perfectly intuitive and I managed to point it to my dictionaries.

I just can't thank you enough for this work --- I really really like it! Well done!

[tigran]

I just hit a serious problem from which I cannot recover --- I stupidly booted into Android and now I can't boot back into Debian Linux. There is no boot menu displayed at all (even though the option is ticked in the Settings) during the boot process.

So, how do I boot back into Debian Linux? Did you say some part of the screen needs to be touched during booting or what?

UPDATE: I removed the card and it booted back into Kobo Start Menu 06. This is a relief
Now, I'll look at the card's content and will try to figure out what is pointing to Android and try to point it back to Debian Linux. But if you know the answer, please let me know. Thank you!

UPDATE: I found it, I think --- I need to edit boot/default.cfg and write 1 into it instead of 2. This should work, let's see... YES, it worked! Thank you for making it easy to manipulate --- I was afraid that I need to hexedit some bit in the MBR of the onboard card, but fortunately it is just a text file boot/default.cfg on on the 5th partition.

[guang6321]

Originally Posted by tigran

I just hit a serious problem from which I cannot recover --- I stupidly booted into Android and now I can't boot back into Debian Linux. There is no boot menu displayed at all (even though the option is ticked in the Settings) during the boot process.

There are two uboot patches, one of them contains boot menu, another has no boot menu(even the option is ticked). I think you choosed the no menu one.
Even there is no boot menu, you can also choose which system to boot. when led blinks, touch the center of the screen, it will boot Debian, touch the bottom part of the screen, it will boot to Android

[tigran]

No, I chose the bootmenu one, but there was still no boot menu. And touching the centre still booted Android.

But that's ok, because editing boot/default.cfg file in the 5th partition solved my problem (but this assumes one has a computer available).

[tigran]

I have a question --- what is the safest way to get rid of Android in this configuration? Should I just delete the 1st (4GB vfat) and 3rd (512MB ext4, presumably Android system?) partitions?

By "delete" I mean, of course, re-creating all the other partitions starting from where the 1st started (61440). But their numbers would be different, naturally. Should I modify some boot file pointing to them?

How does the boot image know which fs to mount as root (e.g. via "root=" command line or some other mechanism)?

Also, I accidentally added a launcher to the bottom panel and in order to remove it I went to ~/.config/xfce4/panel and noticed a new directory called "launcher-30" so I assumed that was my launcher (cat launcher-30/* confirmed this) and so I deleted the whole "launcher-30" directory. But the launcher simply turned to some generic icon and remained on the panel. So, how do I remove it completely?

UPDATE: I tried running xfce4-panel -p and it worked absolutely fine, i.e. clicking on the '-' sign removed this launcher. There is NO NEED to kill the panel before doing this.

UPDATE: One crucial thing that is missing in Debian is TeX Live. Yes, of course I know about "apt-get install texlive texlive-formats-extra texlive-latex-extra" but doing this did NOT install all the bits that I need (e.g. xelatex format was still missing) and if I try to do "apt-get install texlive-full" then it fails. So, there seems to be no way to install xelatex in this environment, i.e. I still have to have access to a x86_64 machine running Fedora Linux.

Also, I noticed that doing "apt-get autoremove texlive texlive-formats-extra texlive-latex-extra" did NOT remove tex and latex binaries --- they are still in /usr/bin/. Probably other files are left as well... Strange.