[Atrix 4G Android Development] NFHimself:
Ramble via webtop:

My approach is to avoid established scripts for fixing dependencies and apps for moving webtop to sd card. Not that I have anything against those, but they were developed using ATT phones and might miss some compatibility with Bell.

One key difference for getting going from scratch is that I installed a standard armel busybox from the busybox site, that avoided a lot of errors when installing debs. Not sure where the busybox comes from in apps2sd but it is not as up to date and results in more errors with missing command line options.

I also didn't want to change/replace the contents of the phone too much so I could easily revert to stock, there is this ICS rumour..

This is what I did:

Starting off I updated the sources.list to be jaunty and just worked through the errors by installing debs manually. lxterminal was installed via deb and tomoyo was disabled by renaming the init and start files. Basically, I did a force install via deb file of some rootfs package contents, coreutils, cpio, dbus, dhcp, gpgv, grep, udev. All references to -mot versions were stripped of the -mot suffix so they could be more easily upgraded. I left the references to ~mot and -motorola in the versions of packages, not sure why, just did. Eventually I got to a place where synaptic was installed and I had no errors. Saved the state in a tarball and kept experimenting with installing things.

I really wanted a home folder elsewhere than /data/home but there are too many hard references to it in webtop for stability, I found a lot in scripts but I suspect they are in binaries as well. You can rbind once in webtop but you need it to have stuff in there during boot, not mix and match configs.

I tried an external hard drive, but there is a fundamental flaw in that logic, they only turn on once you open the lid of the lapdock, so you can't have boot files on it.

I copied the firefox-8.0 from ATT, deleted firefox-7, updated the soft links to point to the 8 version, redid profile.zip to have xda be the home page and adblock installed already, tossed in .xdg-bookmarks to add Network to pcmanfm. I originally had all the home folder stuff in profile.zip but some part of the scripts mess with settings and not everything was carrying over.

So, I did a tarball of my home dir's dot files and put it in /osh2/home/adas so when I do a factory reset and adas is wiped it restores my config. Tip: removing the entire adas folder gives you the same effect for webtop as a factory reset. Reboot and you are back to where you were.

I tried all the window managers, avant/awn anything is annoying when it shifts items left and right when an app opened or closed. I was able to have the stock awn working with a cairo menu, but it still shifted things left and right and was slow. I tried recompiling awn on the phone to get the option to just have launchers but there is this tendency for anything new you compile to require a new libc6. Xfce is cool, menu looked odd though, went with lxde, easy enough to switch if you want. Note: Compiz anything is a waste of time.

I have removed the stock webtop theme and replaced it with clearlooks and murrine window decoration. lxpanel is transparent via manual hack of the config file, the gui for changing things always sets alpha to 0, bug into the prefs app.

I could go on and on, but I like what I have done so far, thought I would pass it along. The main bit for me is not having to install a new kernel or wipe existing partitions, make a lot of phone mods, a pure stock phone can have a custom webtop, just needs to be rooted to copy one file over. Also, I like being able to watch tv shows on my lapdock, worth the price of admission right there for me.:)

Oh, size is around 1.4GB untarred, so it's a least a 2GB ext3 partition. I have an option in there for using mmcblk1p3 for var if you want to copy var over there formatted with smaller clusters. There are a few flags to control things, if you didn't want to remove your sdcard, touch /osh/no_osh2 and reboot the phone to disable. /osh/var_ownp enables the mounting and use of a third partition on the sdcard dedicated to /var. Use that one carefully, commit to it before installing a lot of things, having a mix and match could break the custom webtop.

Cheers!