The final release (at least by me) of the gp2x-gpe, a port of the GPE palmtop environment to the GP2X! This release includes pretty much everything except the kitchen sink. AbiWord, Evince, Gaim, Dillo, Gnumeric, XChat, The GIMP, GpsDrive, GCC are included along with all the standard GPE applications.

Almost everything is working pretty smoothly and there has been some speed increases, most notably the new Xorg server patched by Orkie and compiled under OpenEmbedded.

You can download the archive from here.

If anyone is interested in taking up this project please get in touch with me. I just don’t have enough time to carry this on by myself with work and other commitments.

Screenshots

Requirements

A 256MB or larger SD card. (The image is 128MB at the moment. If there is demand for a smaller image one can be produced, leave a message and I’ll see what I can do.) Also preferable is a working network connection between your GP2X and your PC.

Installing

Loopback ext2 image on SD card

The easiest way to run gp2x-gpe, and probably the only way for most Windows users is to use the ext2 loopback image. To install the image, simply extract the directory gp2x-gpe and it’s contents from the archive to the root of your SD card. You can then simply run the .gpu script provided from the GP2X Utilities Menu. This will launch the X server and the GPE Environment.

ext2 formatted SD card

To get the most out of gp2x-gpe it is advised to use an ext2 formatted SD card. This eliminates the need for a loopback image and improves performance greatly. You will most likely need a Linux machine to do this. Alternatively you can use a Linux Live CD such as Knoppix.

To install, you need to extract the ext2 file system image to the “root” directory under gp2x-gpe (i.e. /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root). Firstly download the archive as normal and extract it to your hard drive. Then mount the ext2 image as follows:

sudo mount gpe-image-gp2x.rootfs.ext2 root/ -o loop

Next you need to copy the mounted “root” directory:

sudo cp -R root/ root-new

Now just umount and remove the old “root” and copy the new “root” into place.

sudo umount root
rmdir root
mv root-new root

Now you just need to remove or comment out the line show below from gp2x-gpe.gpu:

/bin/mount -t ext2 -o loop,noatime,sync $GPEIMAGE $GPEDIR

Lastly, copy the gp2x-gpe directory to your ext2 formatted SD card and run as normal!

Windows users can probably use the ext2 IFS driver available from fs-driver.org or ext2fsd however, this has not been tested.

FAQs

How do I use a swap file with gp2x-gpe?

First off, you will need to create a swap file. A 32MB file should be fine. Under Linux, follow these steps:

dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=32768
mkswap swapfile

You can also download a pre created 32MB swapfile from “here”:/files/swapfile.bz2.

Now copy the swap file to the directory you installed gp2x-gpe on your SD card. You will need to add the following line to gp2x-gpe.gpu just after “/bin/mount none $GPEDIR/tmp -t tmpfs”

/sbin/swapon swapfile

Please note: This can decrease the life of you SD card.

How do I access the gp2x-gpe environment from telnet or sterm?

After you telnet to your GP2X, change to the directory on your SD card that gp2x-gpe is installed in. For example:

cd /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe

Then simply run:

./chroot.static root/ /bin/sh

Licensing

All modifications to the stock OpenEmbedded environment are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Applications within the ROM are subject to their own license.

The OpenEmbedded meta-data used to compile the gp2x-gpe images can be downloaded from here. The meta-data contains all changes to the default OpenEmbedded environment and all custom scripts I’ve made.

You can download the source for the Xorg kdrive server here.

Please understand that I can’t possibly upload the full sources for each application contained in the images. A compressed source tar-ball is well over 1GB. Way to much to upload with my crippled uplink. However, if you would like to obtain the sources for any specific program contained within the images, I’ll be happy to provide them, just send an e-mail to sources (at) darxr (dot) net.