Using latest image--WOW!

Delbert Franz ddf at sonic.net
Thu Oct 6 22:22:18 EDT 2011


I have not changed much on my Nanonote for some months but this week I 
put the latest images onto an 8 GB MicroSD card and gave it a spin.  
Wow, what a step up from what we had when I got my Nanonote in 2010:) 
The graphical user interface is impressive and I played with it for a 
while, but then I went back to using the consoles directly and the 
tiny "unfuzzy font":) It took a while to copy over my custom scripts 
and settings.  Of course, it is made much easier by always booting 
from an SD card, because both SD's can be mounted on a desktop 
computer!  

One of my uses of the Nanonote, other than as a music player, has been 
as a nice portable copy of one of my major projects, managed under 
Mercurial.  My clients use Subversion so I was using the scripts to 
interact with a Subversion repository from Mercurial.  Those have 
always been a bit uncertain.  I think I have had to rebuild my 
Mercurial copy about four times in the last year or so because 
something I did got the scripts so confused it was impossible, at 
least for me, to back out again.  

So I moved to using Git and Git-svn, both of which seem to have an 
avid following and which offers greater control and I hope less 
uncertainty.  So I was happy to find that the package list for the 
Nanonote includes a recent stable version of Git.  It was a simple 
matter of using opkg to install it.  I was able to clone from my 
server copy of the Git repository but when I attempted to do a "git 
pull' to sync the information on the Nanonote with the server, an 
error appeared.  Git claimed it could not find 'git-merge'.  That 
didn't look good:( 

However, there is often a simple solution to what first appears 
complex.  I tracked git-merge to: /usr/libexec/git-core and in fact 
git-merge was there.  The git-core subdirectory has more than 100 
symbolic links with compound names like: git-xxxxxx, where xxxxxx is 
some string of symbols.  There are also about 10 scripts that call on 
various of the symbolic links.  Everything seemed to be there but no 
symbolic link would execute.  All of the symbolic links redirected to 
git, like 

get_merge -> git 

This is incorrect.  I tried a link like that on my desktop and it 
failed as well.  The symbolic link appears to be executable but the 
value pointed to, git in this case, apparently must be fully 
specified.  So I wrote some scripts to remove all of the 112 symbolic 
links and then replace them with the correct links, which look like 
this: 

get-merge ->  /usr/bin/git

Now the "git pull" command works just fine.  I have attached a 
zip-file of the scripts.  However, the build of git should fix this 
error so that the installation yields links that are executable.  

One other minor problem, which has always been there, has to do with 
the hostname not appearing in the call to udhcpc.  My LAN needs to 
have the host name appear so that dhcp will work properly.  The source 
of the problem is in the file: /lib/network/config.sh.  (I use a short 
host name of "nn".)  

Command before change: 

	 $DEBUG eval udhcpc -t 0 -i "$iface" \
	 	${ipaddr:+-r $ipaddr} \
	 	${hostname:+-H $hostname} \
	 	${clientid:+-c $clientid} \
	 	${vendorid:+-V $vendorid} \
	 	-b -p "$pidfile" $broadcast \
	 	${dhcpopts}

Command after explicitly adding '-H nn":

     	 $DEBUG eval udhcpc -t 0 -H nn -i "$iface" \
	 		${ipaddr:+-r $ipaddr} \
	 		${hostname:+-H $hostname} \
	 		${clientid:+-c $clientid} \
	 		${vendorid:+-V $vendorid} \
	 		-b -p "$pidfile" $broadcast \
	 		${dhcpopts}

The mystery to me is that the command appears to be designed to bring 
in the host name but it fails to do so.  In any case, a simple 
explicit change fixes the problem in the near term.  However, it would 
be better if someone could get the script to pickup the host name 
using the hostname command.  

Finally, kudos all around to all those who make better images
happen!  All I can do is tune a few things at the edges:)

Happy Nanonote user,

                  Delbert



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