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!
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:
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…)
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.
I played with XO, the famous “$100 laptop” from the OLPC program a few months age at BarCamp in Chicago. I was really impressed with what it could do despite its modest specs. It seemed to me that a device had been build that made the most of itself (rather than being bloated, sucking lots of power and fragile) unlike many computers I’ve used and owned over the years.
Today I asked my wife if we should buy one (actually we bought two, one of which will be given to a lucky kid somewhere). The price for the device has gone up since the $100 PC announcement, but I still think it’s a good deal and I like the idea of donating to another person a device that is Free (in all the right ways) and exposing them to something GNU. Our kids are nearly ages 2 and 4 and they are both already playing games and learning on our computers. So I figure they are a natural match for the XO. I hope I can resist the urge to play with it constantly and allow them time on it too!
