Qtopia killed my battery!

By the way, if you have a FreeRunner and are running the Qtopia distro, you might be tempted to try and extend your battery life by enabling suspend... don't. It doesn't work correctly and far from saving your battery it will drain it so dead that sitting on the moko charger all night won't charge it.

Which makes me really glad I bought an external battery charger from some random cellphone supply shop I found on the 'net.

jffs2 to .tar.gz

Milestone 2 of FSO came out a few days ago, but inconveniently for those of us who wish to try it out by booting from a microSD card, there's only a jffs2 image file when what we really want is a tarball of the root filesystem. Sadly, the obvious loopback-mount-the-image-and-tar-it-up trick fails with an error:

MTD: Attempt to mount non-MTD device "/dev/loop0"

Here's a brief howto gleaned from the depths of the 'net:

• modprobe mtdram total_size=131072 erase_size=128
• modprobe mtdblock
• dd if=root.jffs2 of=/dev/mtdblock0
• mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt

The image itself is only 47M, so I reduced the 131072 (128k) above to 65536(64k) and it of course worked fine.