[geeks] GEEK OUT

[s at avoidant.org]

Eric Dittman wrote:

> He apologized, and the filling was free.


Ooooh, that doesn't sound like any fun at all. i'd sure hope it was
free. Personally, I'd demand lunch, too.

Sorry I haven't typed up the Agenda roll-yer-own romdisk instructions
yet. It's really simple. Grab
http://www.btinternet.com/~cxm/respin-24-10-2001.tar

Untar it on a Linux box. you don't actually need the script, just the
mkcramfs and uncramfs binaries in there.

Grab a known good romdisk, like
http://www.agendacomputing.de/downloads/root1.2.6.cramfs (this one does
really well with the matching kernel at
http://www.agendacomputing.de/downloads/root1.2.6.kernel-8.00).

put the mkcramfs and uncramfs binaries somewhere you can run them. I
work inside an ~/agenda directory. Put the romdisk there and...

(as root)
mkdir unpack (don't move the romdisk in there)
uncramfs unpack root1.2.6.cramfs

That's it. Now cd into unpack and you'll see your fs tree. Start yanking
stuff you don't need to make space for the stuff you want. I personally
removed the launchpad and all it's associated icons, as well as some
other stuff I don't use. I also grabbed everything in /home/default on
the Agenda (the default user dir, where all my user data like contacts,
etc lives) and copied it all into unpack/defaults/home/default. That way
it's all there when I've finished flashing the romdisk. Don't put it in
unpack/home/default, because it'll be overwritten by
unpack/defaults/home/default after the flash is done.

When you're happy with what's in your fs, cd back up to the ~/agenda dir
and...

mkcramfs unpack root1.2.6_custom.cramfs

and you're ready to go. Grab the latest copy of vrflash
(http://www.apex.net/~jeff/agenda-utils/vrflash-unix/vrflash-0.20.tar.gz)
Follow the build and install instrctions, and run it to flash your new
rootdisk and kernel.

Enjoy! Feel free to bug me if you have questions, or use the lists. The
folks there are very helpfull. You almost never see anybody reply RTFM,
since there isn't one. Google has archives, and if you look there, you
can find all sorts of stuff from the past year and a half.


---sambo