[Gpephone-devel] VMWare images

[Florian Boor]

Hi all,

just a few notes about the VMWare images:
VMware emulates a complete PC with harddisk, network interface, VGA graphics
hardware and whatever. The harddisk of that virtual PC is the file
"GPEPhoneDemo-flat.vmdk" which just contains the same like a real physical
harddisk. This means that it starts with a bootloader and a partition table -
its not only a partition image.
The filesystem on the first partition of the virtual disk is similar to one for
a mobile device. In addition to the G(PE)^2 packages it contains gdb, strace,
Xoo and a X server for vesa graphics cards.
The system uses the ipkg package manager - so you can install additional
packages or update existing ones.

The first serial port of the virtual PC (/dev/ttyS0) is linked to /dev/GSM-Modem
to which you can link the device of your real GSM modem connected to your PC.

To modify the filesystem you can use several different approaches:

- Boot the virtual PC and set up the network connection to your PC.
  You can switch to a console of the virtual PC pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1, you
can log in as root there (no password set).
  Configure the network by running "udhcpc" which get you an IP address.
  The address of the DNS server it prints is the one of your PC the VMWare
player runs on. Now you can copy files (e.g. using scp or wget) from your PC to
the virtual PC. These may be e.g. ipkg packages that can be installed with the
ipkg package manager or a complete new filesystem to overwrite the contents of
the old one (in this case just make sure to restart the virtual PC right after
overwriting the filesystem).

- Replace the whole virtual disk used by VMWare by replacing the file
GPEPhoneDemo-flat.vmdk with a new bootable disk image.

To change the startup of the graphical session (e.g. environment variables or
the applications to start) you can modify the file /etc/X11/phonesession (which
is started from /etc/matchbox/session).  These are provided by the
gpe-sessionscripts-phone package.

Restarting the GUI applications is easy too, just run:
/etc/init.d/gpe-dm stop
and
/etc/init.d/gpe-dm start

Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
is the hope of today                    Tel: +49 271-771091-14
and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: +49 271-771091-19
[Robert Hutchings Goddard, 1904]        florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de

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