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!
“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.”
“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…”
“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.”
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:
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…)
Warning: all suggestions provided warranty-free, it’s recommended to backup your /home/olpc/.config/ folder before trying certain tweaks
These are a few of the hacks I’ve found helpful:
Installing VLC, MPlayer:
as root:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm
yum install vlc mplayer
To get wireless up and running:
as root:
yum install wifi-radar
(python/pygtk frontend to ifconfig, iwconfig, etc)
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
(stops OLPC Network Manager)
wifi-radar
(creates wifi-radar.conf)
nano /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf
(change eth0 to eth1)That’s all!
To get backlight running on XFCE:
I created a launcher and submenu after determining that a command of the form:
“su –command=’echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness’
provided adequate backlight control
I created a file in /home/olpc/.config/xfce4/panel called launcher-backlight.rc
[Entry 0]
Name=backlight
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
Comment=sets backlight state
X-XFCE-IconCategory=0[Entry 1]
Name=bl0
Exec=su –command=’echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness’
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false
Icon=bl=0[Entry 2]
Name=bl5
Exec=su –command=’echo 5 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness’
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false
Icon=bl=5[Entry 3]
Name=bl10
Exec=su –command=’echo 10 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness’
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false
Icon=bl=10[Entry 4]
Name=bl15
Exec=su –command=’echo 15 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness’
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false
Icon=bl=15
next:
nano /home/olpc/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml
browse through the xml file to find the section <items>
towards the bottom, type
<item name=”launcher” id=”backlight”/>
Now, ctrl-alt-delete will restart X and XFCE. When it does, you should see a small gear on the panel, click it to expand. Select an option. You will be prompted for your root password. Enter it in, and the back light will immediately change.
for use with genmon, I’ve found the following commands helpful:
cat /sys/class/power_supply/olpc-battery/capacity
cat /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness
Best of luck and happy hacking,
Ian Daniher
Genmon is a wonderful XFCE panel plugin for providing the status of just about anything. Using the trusty “grep” and “awk” tools we can format the output of a command to fit nicely inside of the genmon plugin. Here is a tutorial to make it work and give new users a chance to see the usefulness of “grep” and “awk”. This is assuming you have XFCE running on your machine (XO or otherwise) to use the genmon plugin, but the first part will be about polling HAL that you can do from the TERMINAL activity in Sugar too! HAL is short for hardware abstraction layer and is a way to interface with the hardware to get information or change how a device works. There is a battery monitor plugin for XFCE but it does not seem to like the XO way of doing stuff, so we will make our own.
Shawn Moore has posted instructions for installing zsnes on the XO from his blog. I noticed a few typos and here is how I did it. This is a good way to get over any fears of compiling software from source code!
$ su
# yum install gcc gcc-c++ make nasm zlib-devel SDL-devel
# exit
$ wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zsnes/zsnes151src.tar.bz2
$tar jxvf zsnes151src.tar.bz2
$ cd zsnes_1_51/src
$ ./configure –disable-debugger –disable-opengl
$ make
$ ./zsnes
enjoy!
If you want to install the program in your system for all users to run, read on…
OLPC with XFCE Desktop
As much as I like our new OLPC, our daughter who was reared on the XFCE desktop had trouble navigating about the Sugar interface that comes with the OLPC XO. Fortunately there are xfce packages in the OLPC RPM repositories. XFCE runs well in 128MB of ram on another machine I own, so I figured that the XO would be happy with its 256MB alotment. After using it for a few hours, I’m convinced that until Sugar and the apps it comes with are more refined, that I’ll stick to XFCE for everyday use for my kids. I’ll give you the basic steps involved and show you how to default to the XFCE environment on boot up if you are confortable using the terminal, repository tools like yum or even apt-get and are willing to edit a startup script.
