Wary 5.1.2 on Gecko Edubook

I have Wary 5.1.2 running nicely on the Gecko Edubook netbook. See previous post
http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201107/need-mplayer-pet-for-edubook.html

The main problem with this netbook is the under-powered 1GHz RDC Vortex86MX CPU.

Everything in Wary is compiled for a i486 CPU, except for libvpx, ffmpeg and perhaps mplayer. However, back at Wary 0.3, I did have ffmpeg (and perhaps mplayer) configured for i486 CPU, so see above link for PETs that I installed (as used in Wary 0.3) to fix Mplayer in Wary 5.1.2 on the Edubook. Note though, ffmpeg does not use libvpx, these are pre-webM packages.

There are some issues. I couldn't get Wary 5.1.2 to boot off a USB stick, I had to hack the 'init' script, but I will probably have that fixed for the next release of Wary. However, if you have an external USB optical drive, you should be able to boot from that and install Wary to the Edubook.

I chose an ATA/IDE hard drive installation in the Universal Installer, even though it is actually flash media. I partitioned the media with sda1 as a small 256MB vfat, and sda2 as ext3. I ran Grub4DOS after installing Wary, which modified the MBR. I did a frugal install.

SNS (Simple Network Setup) recognised my wifi network, but could not connect. That is something I need to checkout. Anyway, Dougal's Network Wiizard did connect, but when I powered up this morning it did not connect -- I right-clicked the desktop 'connect' icon and chose "Autoconnect" and it then did connect. Why not automatically at bootup? -- another thing to checkout.

On first shutdown, I chose to save the session to the entire sda2 partition. This is a good choice for non-technical users I reckon, as they won't have to worry about resizing the save-file.

It all works, wifi (apart from issue above) (I am typing this message in the Edubook!), sound, powerof.

I am giving this Edubook away, but have another that I will work on, tackle the issues -- or rather, that will go into my to-do list.

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Comments

RDC Xorg driver
Username: BarryK
I should mention also that Wary has the RDC Xorg driver, and when you run the Xorg Wizard, just select "Probe" and the Wizard will automatically choose the RDC driver. This gives you nice video, specifically for the Vortex86MX chip. Xorg Vesa does work as I recall, but has some issues.

dhcpcd upgrade for Edubook
Username: BarryK
"I have installed this upgrade PET: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_packages-wary5/dhcpcd-5.2.12-w5.pet This might help with the wifi connection. Testing now... rebooted... yes, wifi has connected.

Dhcpcd on Edubook
Username: BarryK
"Oh dear, I hsve tried and tried to connect, no go. I uninstalled dhcpcd 5.2.12 and now it works. So, maybe there is some sense in T2 staying with the old version!

Tags: puppy