Welcome to the ares home page.

What is it?

ares is A Romdisk Editing System. A romdisk is an image one puts onto small devices. I built ares to edit the romdisks one uses for the Agenda VR3 GNU/Linux PDA. The romdisk is pretty much everything but the kernel.

The romdisks that both Agenda and independant developers release may or may not have all the software one wishes to use on one's PDA. Thus I created this system.

How it works is as follows: you tell ares to unpack a romdisk. It puts it in whatever directory you tell it to. Now you can edit the image as you wish. Once you are done you pack up the image again then zip it over to the VR3.

Requirements

Python >2. Sorry 1.5ers but there are a few too many > 2.0 constructs for me to remove. Please install a recent version (it is possible, of course, to have more than one version of python installed. When installing ares be sure to install it with python2)

What Can It Do?

While the romdisk is uncompressed you have the opportunity to make whatever changes you like. ares can automate some of these changes for you. Here is a list of ares' current "Actions":

• UnpackAction: uncompress a romdisk
• ShrinkAction: use mipsel-linux-strip to significantly decrease the size of the image
• RestoreAction: if you used Andy Defaults/backup.sh to make a backup of the flash you can restore that backup to the image before flashing the PDA (NOTE: you must restore defaults after the flash for it to work!).
• TimezoneAction: set the timezone
• BinaryDeleteAction: delete what binaries you don't like.

What Will It Do?

Here's my todo list:

• Install VRPs cleanly
• Deinstall VRPs cleanly

How About an Example or Two?

• To unpack a romdisk, shrink it, then repack it:
  ares.sh -i ./root-1.0.2.cramfs -o /tmp/root.net -s /tmp/unpack
• To make a backup, unpack a romdisk, restore the backup to the image, shrink it, then repack it:
  backup.sh (from andy_defaults)
  ares.sh -i ./root-1.0.2.cramfs -o /tmp/root.new -s -r /home/foo/backup/flash -f " --exclude '*~ " /tmp/unpack

• ares sf.net home page
• bcollar's home page
• webified cvs

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• agendawiki.com: a good place to start for info on the Agenda VR3.
• Andy's Help Page
• Agenda Software Repository
• Today's Agenda

This site is kindly hosted by SourceForge. Yeah them!