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When you run olpc-update to upgrade the software on your XO laptop, you lose some of your customizations (which I just did ). Here's what I've customized so I have a quick reference to get it all back next time. Set the timezone : su sugar-control-panel -s timezone 'America/Los_Angeles' Set a root password: su -l passwd This allows me to ssh to the XO (as root, I know, I know) which at least allows me to use my nice desktop keyboard and monitor to do most of the rest. I tried setting the user account password instead once, but it seems like Sugar wouldn't start after that. This page seems to indicate that you should be able to do that (now?) though. I'll have to try it again. Set up quake terminal (scroll down the page a bit). I keep a copy of the quake_terminal.txt file in my home directory on the laptop. To set it up I just do this: su -l cp /home/olpc/quake_terminal.py /usr/share/sugar/shell/view/quake.py Then apply this patch to /usr...

I upgraded my XO to Build 703 this week. It was a little difficult at first, but I like it now. It's so cool that it now suspends when you close the lid. This is the first Linux laptop that I've had that does that so smoothly. Disk space is at a premium on this little machine. I actually couldn't get Sugar to start after the upgrade until I did a ctrl-alt-f1 over to a virtual console and removed some files from my home directory. One utility that is nice for adding and, maybe more importantly, removing Activities is xo-get.py . Once installed you can just ./xo-get.py remove ActivityName to free up more disk space. Nice. Removing activities wasn't nearly enough though. I was still really full on disk space and after poking around with du I found the /versions directory that seems to contain the complete set of files for the previous version of the OLPC software (after an update you can boot the previous version by holding down tho 'o' gamepad key...

I have a confession to make. I'm an avowed Linux geek, yet I haven't complied the kernel in years. The last time was probably in school when I had to write my own scheduler for the kernel as an assignment, which isn't all that bad when you consider that most people compiling their own kernels are just enabling some obscure driver that they needed. They haven't made Major Modifications to a core piece like The Scheduler. Right? Right? Well, OK, the scheduler wasn't anything to write home about, but it still felt pretty l33t. Anyway, I've decided it's time I delve into the source of Linux again. It's one of the most successful large software projects on the planet, and it's completely open for anyone to dig into. It would be a horribly wasted opportunity for a serious software engineer to miss out on, especially someone interested in nitty-gritty low-level stuff. Even if you aren't interested in OS code or drivers at all, you could study...

I just took WAF for a very brief test drive after seeing ESR mention it on emacs-devel (trying to find an answer to a completely different emacs related issue). I really like how easy it is to install and try out a demo with it, and the manual isn't bad. I like the colored output and ascii-art progress bars. Nice touches. It's all Python, which is both good and bad. The syntax isn't super intuitive (compared to basic make where you pretty much just list files and commands), being all python functions that set up and and get called by internals of the tool itself, but I guess once you get the hang of it that wouldn't be too bad. It also does more than just build. It handles detection of compilation tools, dependency tracking (yes it understands C/C++ preprocessing), and also does languages other than C/C++. If I had a new project I'd definitely give it a try.

I like f-spot a lot, but it has a few things that really bug me. I guess I should stop complaining and get involved , but then I'd have to learn C#. I don't know if I can bring myself to do that ;-) Anyway, here is what I used to see when I connected my digital camera to my Ubuntu 7.10 machine: Now that I have Ubuntu 8.04, when I plug in my camera I first see this: Yes, that's two confusing choices for one camera. Choosing either gets the same results: Yup, it's offering to download some xml files and some other non-image files, and more room is devoted to showing you the full path to the files (that you really don't care about) than to showing you the actual thumbnail image. The option to delete from the camera what you just downloaded is gone too. Oh, and no videos will actually show up in F-spot, the program that is now doing this importing. Was anyone who uses a digital camera consulted on this move? I'm not alone in not liking this chan...