Maemotalk

Gentoo on VMWare Player

February 21, 2006 on 9:00 pm | In gentoo, vm, winxp | 3 Comments

for whatever reason, i am partial to Gentoo linux, and really don’t like any distro based on RPMs. Slackware, BSD and debian have my respect, but I still am more comfortable with Gentoo. So - no apologies.

I am stuck with a corporate WinXP system and have been using coLinux for about a year or so as my virtual machine on my desktop. It is functional - as long as you do everything on the command line.

Recently I decided to see what the VMWare player had to offer in the GUI arena for virtual machines, for two basic reasons. If i was going to be doing lots of maemo porting, i would rather have a Linux GUI. Secondly i tried upgrading to the 0.6.3 coLinux version (first new release in nearly a year) and it broke my existing installation (locks on boot), so i had to backrev my install and it works fine. But i decided it was time to look at VMWare again.

VMWare does not have any Gentoo images, and does not link to any Gentoo images on their community site. So i Googled for it and found this link. The process outlined worked perfectly.

The command to creating the image file is ‘qemu-img create -f vmdk filename.vmdk size’. That is the only purpose for installing qemu.
To make it easier, I have packaged up the vmx and (empty) vmdk files described in this writeup into a tar.bz2 file. These two files, the VMWare player and the Gentoo install disk ISO will be all you need to install Gentoo to an image file. Edit the vmx file for your install, boot into the Gentoo install disk (through the VMWare player) and follow the process in the Gentoo Handbook.

Be warned the vmdk file will grow to at least 4 GB (and probably more) by the time you get a GUI loaded.
good luck

ubergEEK

PS - Like everything else on this blog, use at your own risk. Just because it worked for me, does not mean i assume responsibility for anything you do.

USBNet with Nokia770 / WinXP

February 21, 2006 on 6:46 pm | In maemo, nokia770, winxp | 1 Comment

Back when I was coding for the Zaurus, the easiest method for coding was to SSH into the Zaurus over the USB network interface. With SSH and SCP I could code on the Zaurus from any platform. Even my corporate Win2k system.

Well that Zaurus is dead and gone, and now I have the 770. Now i do concede that the USB flash drive interface is a lowest common denominator mdel, and perhaps more appealing to the non-geek, but TCP over USB is much more functional for any interactive coding / development.

Since the USB interface on the 770 has been designed to support both the flash memory interface and the TCP over USB interface the hard part has already been done. So now our problem becomes two separate problems. The first is to manage the interface on the Nokia so it looks like a USBNet interface. The second is to get the WinXP system to configure to talk over it.

In order to enable the USBNet interface on the 770, the g_ether module needs to be loaded and the usbnet interface needs to be enabled. This displaces the g_memory module that would normally be hooked in when the USB interface is connected to a master device.

The manual process for enabling and managing the USBNet interface and Linux hosts has been defined and discussed on at least two other maemo.org pages (http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowTo). So if you are interested in how it works, look at those pages.
Based on the content of the pages I have written a bash script (usbnet) and packaged it for the 770. It places a the usbnet script on the /var/lib/install/usr/sbin directory and supports service like commands such as ‘usbnet start|stop|restart|status’. However it should be noted that Nokia has indicated that the USBNet interface is not particularly stable. I believe it is related to conflicts associated with the automatic enabling / disabling the g_memory module when the usbcable is connected (when the g_ether module owns the usb interface).

On WinXP (sp2) hosts, it already has usbnet drivers installed. However you have to follow a certain process in order to create a virtual network device for the USBNet interface.

1. copy the linux.inf file to the some convenient location on the WinXP host
2. put the Nokia 770 in USBNet mode.
3. connect it to the WinXP host.
4. When prompted for the device driver point windows as the linux.inf file/
5. it should load the driver. name the interface something salient, like Nokia770 USB.
6. Set the IP address staticly to 192.168.2.1 / subnet 255.255.255.
7. SSH to address 192.168.2.15 (Nokia 770). If your SSH server is running you should get a login prompt.

That should work.

Right now if the script indicates that the usbnet interface is up on the Nokia 770, but WinXP does not recognize it on connection, try ‘usbnet restart’. That forces re-initalization of the g_ether module. This is usually associated with disconnection of the usb cable (and the event drives some code). If i get around to it, i will try to dig into the event response code and find out what is going on and update my script to deal better with it.

ubergEEk.

PS - Like everything else on this blog, use at your own risk. Just because it worked for me, does not mean i assume responsibility for anything you do.