QPE and init

Introduction

The current .ipk's for QPE install at script to startup and shutdown the main qpe process into /etc/rc2.d/.

This works well enough until QPE crashes. Personally, this happens to me once every 2-4 weeks. Not bad; but, annoying when it happens.

Some people would suggest that this situation isn't so bad. "Simply reboot."

On my machine, I have moved Application/, Documents/, and Settings/ to /mnt/ramfs/, with symlinks from /root/. Rebooting is painful because I would need to restore my data from the desktop (using rsync).

One other source of pain is this often happens to me during nethack :-( In order to save my game, I need to send nethack SIGHUP. BTW, I ascended an absolutely brutal wizard on the iPAQ thanks, in part, to SIGHUP.

Solution

init is the program of choice for respawning daemons that do not know how to restart themselves. (Ignore the flame bait and keep reading.)

I also took the opportunity to cleanup some of the problems I saw in /etc/init.d/qpe. I prefer PID files to searching for PIDs with ps.

Download my patch which changes /etc/init.d/qpe and /etc/inittab.

You will also need to setup /etc/rc3.d/. I did this by ln /etc/rc2.d/* /etc/rc3.d. Hard links of symlinks is a little gross; but, they do work under linux. You may opt for cpio instead.

Then cleanup /etc/rc2.d/ with the following barrage of commands:


	 rm /etc/rc3.d/S??qpe
	
 cd /etc/rc2.d
	
 mv S??qpe K90qpe
	
 mv S??qpe2uschedule K91qpe2uschedule

Before running init 3, shutdown qpe and qpe2uschedule. Both must be done manually.

I also added K99screenoff to my /etc/rc2.d/ which turns of the backlight.