Free Like GNU

Wow, what a nice surprise! (This has actually been in development since December of last year ) The OLPC Sugar desktop environment is available in the Ubuntu Hardy repository! You can use the emulator to run it in a window or login as a full blown desktop through GDM (the default login screen for (X)Ubuntu users)! I had trouble with connecting to my WPA network, but I think if I stop Network-Manager before loging in with Sugar, it will work.  The turtle-art application worked very nicely and it was fun to browse networks.  I would love to have Sugars network browser in a little box, or as a desktop background in XFCE.  Now I have to find a way to make Sugar happy on a 800×600 screen so my kids can use it on their machines.

Available activities (in Hardy Universe) are:

• sugar-calculate-activity
• sugar-chat-activity
• sugar-connect-activity
• sugar-logviewer-activity
• sugar-memorize-activity
• sugar-pippy-activity
• sugar-terminal-activity
• sugar-turtleart-activity
• sugar-web-activity

Many of the missing applications (measure, newsreader,analyze) can be found by adding the Sugar PPA repository! It looks as though Paint and Record may be available before long as well. You may also be able to run the Gutsy versions from the debs in Jani’s PPA archive. SimCity/Micropolis is in there too!

Visit Jani Monoses blog for other related developments.

(I just could not resist changing the title)

EDIT: IT IS NOW SOLD…thank you..

I’ve posted my XO laptop for sale on eBay. It’s a great device to hack on and a bit of computing history that I’m rather loathe to part with. I’m selling it because I need the funds to upgrade another machine. I’m flashing it to the latest stable release, but for FLG blog readers I will also install XFCE to it if you wish.

In an effort to minimize duplication of effort and allow for editing and optimizations, I’ve posted the Ubuntu How-To on the official OLPC wiki. Please refer to this page and use its TALK tab for discussion. Thanks to everyone for support and encouragement!

• December 30th, 2007, Wayan Vata posts a challenge to the community to boot Ubuntu on the XO in his forum on OLPC News.

“If you are intrepid and can get Ubuntu to boot and run on the XO, I have the fame and glory of a OLPC News post all about your efforts waiting for you.”

• January 9th, 2008, As contented Ubuntu user since the Hoary Hedgehog days, I get Ubuntu to boot based on the hard work of fellow community members. I also post an indepth tutorial on my own website.

• January 10th, 2008, Argonaut posts in the OLPCNews forum about the tutorial I posted on my little blog with a link. Sortly thereafter, Moocapiean confirms that the tutorial works.

• Moocapiean further refines the process of installation (responsibly citing sources) and creates tutorials on the OLPC News Forum.

• January 14th, 2008, Wayan Vata posts in OLPC News front page:

“Over sixty replies later, and thanks to the extensive work of Moocapiean, we now have step-by-step tutorials for two different ways to get Ubuntu on the XO…”

• No mention of me or any other contibutors outside of his website and no mention of Ubuntu on the OLPC until there are tutorials on OLPC News.

• Wayan also states:

“And joy is what I feel with this amazing example of how the OLPC News Forum advances the XO laptop, One Laptop Per Child, and Open Source software one loving hack at a time.”

• How would you feel?

Holger Levsen has backported the xorg amd drivers from Dilingers SID to ETCH and made a little repository for them. What this means for Ubuntu Gutsy on the XO is having snappy 2D acceleration (no, GLX gears still runs at about 60fps, and thats not likely to change much due to hardware abilities). Games like Frozen Bubble and playing Xvid videos will see a great improvement however! If you already have Gutsy setup on your XO, and are missing accelerated 2D read on:

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You can access the internal flash drive when booting from a USB/SD flash by mounting it!

make a folder somewhere handy:

# mkdir /media/nand

# mount -t jffs2 mtd0 /media/nand

I know it looks weird but there is no path for mtd0!

Thanks to kevin_ in #olpc for the tip!

There has been some conjecture and spin lately about what involvement Microsoft will have with the OLPC foundation, particularly that involving XP booting on the XO. I’ll admit it gives me chills about the prospect of something as closed and proprietary as Windows XP being sent to schools and other organizations. They are in need of a cheap and extensible and maintainable educational device, not a locked-in handout based on premis of what companies like Microsoft deem “emerging markets.” This seems more like a euphemism for a cheaper enty fee to vendor lock-in, to which we are becoming more painfully aware. This is happening at the level of schools, villages or whole countries, so indeed it warrants some discussion.

All the while, even as I rant and the spin doctors spin their tales, cooler heads prevail. One such soul is Ivan Krstić, lead architect of the Bitfrost security software for the OLPC Foundation. In his blog, he dispells much myth and conjecture about what OLPC is actually doing and reminds us all that Freedom is not about closing doors, even to those who would close us out. What we may never know, however, are Microsoft’s true intentions. We can only hope that a little Freedom gives them something deeper to think about than the bottom line.

Since we received our OLPC, I’ve had the overwhelming urge to install Xubuntu on it. Xubuntu is not the lightest desktop out there, but the XO seems to play nice with XFCE ontop of the RedHat based OS that comes it, so instead of full-blown Xubuntu, I installed Ubuntu (CLI from net-install) with slimmed XFCE ontop. Ubuntu offers all the software I like to use and <troll>Debian Packages are just SO much more sophisticated than RPMS</troll>! Anyways, here’s how I did it from Ubuntu on my other laptop using QEmu to install from a netboot ISO to disk image to flash drive (or SD card). Basically we are installing Ubuntu to a virtual file, and replacing the kernel and modules with those from the OLPC. It’s a dirty kind of hack (we should really compile the kernel and modules and package it as a .deb, no?) Please let me know if I forgot anything!

EDIT: Please visit the official OLPC wiki page for this guide

Read on for instruction.. (more…)

While its easy enough to get emulators with most distros like Ubuntu or Red Hat, we have to work a little bit to get them working on the XO. dgen is a old, but decent Genesis/MD emu and you can find an RPM of it here

You will need SDL and a compatability library installed first:

$su

# yum install SDL compat-libstdc++-296

then create a link to that library that dgen will like

# cd /usr/lib

#ln -s libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

you will have to override dependencies to actually install dgen

# cd <path when the dgen-sdl-1.23-1.i386.rpm file was downloaded>

# rpm -Uvh --nodeps dgen-sdl-1.23-1.i386.rpm

# exit

try dgens scaler which does not require OpenGL

$ dgen -S3 <rom file>

if it doesn’t work then you should remove dgen and try to install it without the –nodeps option. You will then have to install whatever packages it needs (excluding the non-existant libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 )

# yum remove dgen-sdl-1.23-1

install the dependencies, then reinstall using the –nodeps  option again…

Albert Cahalan just posted Tux Paint as an OLPC activity on the OLPC wiki! This version of Tux Paint is a very recent CVS build (more recent than what is found in the Koji repos) and is Sugar-ified! Beware that this build is a little more CPU intensive and is not as stable as the Tux Paint in the repository.
There are, however, alot new features including a nice color picker palette and svg brushes as well as full screen.

alternate instructions below…

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