Switching g-i from DirectFB to X11

[Cyril Brulebois]

Frans Pop <elendil at planet.nl> (08/02/2010):
> I have given your image (it used console-setup) a quick try earlier
> today and was very impressed. I noticed a few minor issues [1], but
> in general it worked perfectly.

I'm glad it doesn't only work at home. :)


I've managed to resurrect an old box, and I rebuilt all packages for
i386. To this effect, I've put up a reprepro-based repository to store
both source packages and i386 binaries (both .debs and .udebs), in
case somebody wants to build an own image; that's probably a more
convenient way of getting the sources as well.

You can find the pool at:
  http://people.debian.org/~kibi/udebs-v1/

(Which should be signed with my key, although I've only performed
localudebs-based image builds.)


Some packages got a quick and dirty version bumps due to:
 1. the fact I'm building against sid (I wanted to use the latest
    source packages, instead of starting by lagging behind using
    testing's).
 2. the fact that some packages got uploaded (namely: vte, xrandr) to
    sid in the meanwhile
so changelogs and versions might not exactly match the ones one would
get from applying the patches I mentioned previously.

In order to rebuild everything, I've used the following order (there
are 33 of them, although some like libdrm are no longer needed):
  libfontenc
  libxfont
  libgpg-error
  libgcrypt11
  libpciaccess
  libxau
  libxdmcp
  libxcb
  libx11
  libxext
  libxfixes
  libxrender
  libdrm
  udev
  xorg-server
  xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xft
  libxinerama
  libxi
  libxrandr
  libxcursor
  libxcomposite
  libxdamage
  libxkbfile
  x11-xkb-utils
  xkeyboard-config
  cairo
  pango1.0
  gtk+2.0
  gtk2-engines
  dmz-cursor-theme
  vte

so if you want to rebuild them for another architecture, a bit of
shell scripting, reprepro and sbuild are your friends. I didn't go as
far as setting buildd/wanna-build, but you may want to do so. :)


As for the resulting image, it seems to work like a charm on my Athlon
XP1800+ box/256MB RAM box. I've booted it through PXE (using dnsmasq's
embedded TFTP server, with its default /srv/tftp pointing to
dest/netboot/gtk). I only got lost during the manual partionning in
Tamil, so I got back to selecting another language before going on. :)


I think my next moves are going to be:
 - Tweaking lowmem case for X (should be easy once I've figured out
   how this and that components in d-i work)
 - Fixing the build of the fbdev driver to get 2 proper flavours
   (should be easy), and maybe having a look at the HACK/TODO bits
   I've left along the path in the various git branches/standalone
   patches.
 - Trying to integrate console-setup properly this time, so that once
   one has set it up once in d-i, preferences can be fed directly into
   the installed system, so that one doesn't need to answer the very
   same questions again. Even though console-setup might chosen in the
   end (although it looks like the way to go to tweak X), that's going
   to be a good exercise for me. :)


Mraw,
KiBi.
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