These are notes on problems/errata etc. on these Debian Woody 
tarballs that have come up since posting these tarballs.  I
welcome input/feedback on these distributions; if you have problems
lemme know about 'em.  B.D.D. (dushaw@apl.washington.edu)  

2/22/03

(1) I tried out xpdf and found that it is too slow to be much use.  I've
removed it, and its associated packages.  Too bad.  I think this is an
xpdf issue - it is just not very quick.

(2) I gave up and installed the xfonts-75dpi package.  It seems there are too
many X applications that expect this package (gvim, xpdf, and rxvt looks
better).  With removal of xpdf and addition of this package, I have 25MB of
free disk space on my 100 MB partition.

(3) I've noticed that one can start X up with "xinit & exit" - this saves a
little memory because the console bash shell is exited.  (I've also given up
on ash and other shells - bash is just too useful.)

2/20/03

(1) I've now got my system set up with ssh, dillo, octave, gnuplot, less,
rsh-client, rsh-server, perl, gvim (and vim), irda, and xpdf.  I repartitioned 
my 128 MB CF disk to have 20 MB dos and 101 MB ext2.  After clean up of 
the extraneous junk, I have 23 MB of free space available - not too bad!  
Note that you can delete binaries that you'll never use, e.g., /usr/sbin/sshd,
or vim.org (made after installing vim-gtk).  What shall I put on next...gcc? :)

(2) You can remove most of pam if you like, and avoid the use of passwords
altogether.  This will also save 400+ KB of disk space.  The steps are:
	(a) edit /etc/pam.conf to have the following four lines:
		OTHER   auth       optional     /lib/security/pam_permit.so
		OTHER   account    optional     /lib/security/pam_permit.so
		OTHER   password   optional     /lib/security/pam_permit.so
		OTHER   session    optional     /lib/security/pam_permit.so
	(b) save the file /lib/security/pam_permit.so somewhere, e.g., ~
	(c) remove the /etc/pam.d directory 
		rm -rf /etc/pam.d
	    [If you install other packages, this directory may reappear - it
	    must be deleted or you will not be able to login!!  Use the
	    initrd boot up to fix the system if you forget.]
	(d) remove the libpam-modules and passwd packages
		dpkg --purge --force-depends libpam-modules
		dpkg --purge --force-depends passwd
	(e) leave in the libpam0g package!
	(f) move pam_permit.so back to /lib/security
	(g) done!  Now you and root can log in without passwords.


2/17/03

(1) I forgot to formally install shellutils.  The pieces from shellutils
are all there, but it needs to be actually installed.  There are 
probably other things that are in the distribution, but have not been
formally installed with dpkg.

(2) Check the directory /var/log - there may be some large (20MB???) files
there.  These are log files of logins: lastlog and wtmp, which record your 
logins - they will continue to grow in size unless rotated/deleted.  From 
the man pages for utmp, if you delete these files the login logs will not 
be kept, and these files will not be created.  This is probably the best 
option for the psion.  The tarballs have these files, though they are small.

(3) I have had some real problems with disk errors on installing a 
sequence of deb files leading to disk corruption.  I have no answer
for this, other than to say (a) such errors seem to be reported all to often,
(b) once the system is installed/stable, I VERY rarely get disk errors, (c) 
you may have to make repeated installation of the tarball to clean up corrupted
systems, (d) it may help to execute sync often when installing 
a bunch of packages.  It seems to happen sometimes when an installation of a *.deb
files fails for, e.g., dependency problems.  What can I tell you?  I wish 
I knew what causes this....  Have patience.  I've worked through it and
things seem to be working just fine now.

(4) When starting up a kernel in ArLo right after rebooting you may get
a triple beep and a reboot back to EPOC.  This happens sometimes -
merely try again.  This is harmless.

(5) I've forgotten to make the touchpanel (/dev/tpanel) and serial port 
devices (/dev/ttyAM0, ttyAM1):

   mknod /dev/tpanel c 10 11
   mknod /dev/ttyAM0 c 204 16    [ IRDA serial port ]
   mknod /dev/ttyAM1 c 204 17    [ regular serial port ]

(6) Curiously, without all of the X fonts installed (e.g., 75dpi) gvim
fails to start in GUI mode.  Edit /usr/share/vim/gvimrc to set the
default font to be something like 9x15 - include a line
               set guifont=9x15

(7) You will need to install irattach-common to use IRDA.