Some More Tweaks to my XO

I went through all the tweaks to get XFCE running on the XO. It definitely feels snappier than Sugar, but it's all a big hack, and you still don't get the camera and microphone, and networking with wifi-radar was a little iffy.

Bill Clementson gave some great tips for tweaking the XO to make Sugar a little more adult friendly. I love his quake terminal hack, it is so much faster and convenient than the built in terminal activity. I have also settled on Firefox as my browser like him. It looks pretty good:

For some reason I just couldn't get used to Opera. Firefox seems a little slower than Opera did, but it still feels faster than the browse activity that came with the XO. Bump up the minimum font size on Firefox to about 20 and it looks beautiful.

I got evince to install for viewing PDF files (yum install evince) and it works pretty well too:

I spent this evening upgrading my family website all from my couch with the XO. Being able to flip from Firefox to the terminal with ctrl-down was awesome, and I still can't get over how quiet, cool, and, well, cuddly the XO is. I used my work laptop for a bit and it is so uncomfortable with all it's sharp corners, noisy fans, and lap-burning heat. It's also nice to not have to worry about battery time with the XO like I do with the laptop. Just turning off the LCD backlight saves so much power. What a great machine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Put /etc Under Revision Control (with git)

UPDATE : There is a much easier way now : sudo aptitude install etckeeper There, now etc is under revision control and changes are automatically committed with a helpful message after you install new packages. Thanks for the tip, Marcelo! Read on for the original blog entry. --- I put my /etc directory under revision control. I used git. It's awesome. Not that I think I'm going to wholesale copy my /etc from one machine to another, nor because I'm going to branch my /etc directory and spend weeks developing some cool new feature (whatever that would look like...) and then merge it back into the main branch. No, it's mostly because I like the idea of having the big "undo" option that having things under revision control provides. Having to commit changes and write check-in comments when I make changes helps me stay more organized too. It's never good when I go in willy-nilly to make a "quick change" to some configuration file. I r
Read more