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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 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 Fir...

Video is slightly choppy on the XO, but you can play it with mplayer . Sweet!

I've been making a point lately of perusing " The Official Site of the Embedded Development Community ," since I consider myself an embedded developer, and well, apparently that's the "Official Site," um, for my, uh, "Community." It seems more like place for vendors and consultants to promote their business by writing promotional pieces thinly veiled as technical articles, but if it's Official who is a young upstart like me to judge. Anyway, that's really beside my point. The reason I'm writing is that there was one article that caught my eye this week about building your own Linux distribution . The main thing I got out of it was to learn of the existence of Puppy Linux . After the glowing review the author of the article gave of its distribution building tools, I read up a little more on Puppy, and decided to give it a try. Let me just report to you, that it is sweet! I'm typing this on my 7 and a half year-old Thinkpad T...

Yes, that's Windoze XP on my XO laptop. Click on the image for a larger version. The resolution doesn't quite match the XO screen's native resolution. Minor detail. OK, so it's not running directly on the XO hardware. It's running on a KVM virtual machine. And actually, that's not running on the XO hardware either. It's running on my Core 2 Duo machine that runs Ubuntu. What's running on the XO is an ssh client, an X server, and some good wifi networking. The XO makes a sweet little thin client. So, um, nothing really to see here. Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up. Or fears.

I just wanted to say a big thank you to Antonio for bamboozling me into buying an XO laptop. I had forgotten that it was his blog entry that got me going with the idea of buying one. I'm so glad I did. I love it. My kids love it. And we've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with it. My 7-year old confidently explained to my 3-year old, "It doesn't have any games," yet he can't leave it alone. He's choosing to play with the XO instead of mindless pbskids.org games or watching TV. He hasn't even found the Record or Measure activities yet! That is success. So um, Antonio, if you really don't have use for your, "plastic paperweight," I'd love to take it off your hands. With only one around the house, we haven't been able to try out the Chat activity or other sharing features yet.

My XO laptop has arrived! And we are impressed. It's one awesome machine. I love the rugged feel. I had no qualms about letting my 3-year old, or even my 1-year old play with it. Every portable electronic device should feel this tough and usable. The 1-year old had a blast with it. I was really wishing I had a video camera on him. He sat on the couch with it between his legs and pushed every button with both his fingers and toes. He flipped the rabbit-ear antenna/latches up and down, rotated the screen, closed it, opened it, cycled through display orientations, and when I got it back from him it typed only in foreign language characters (I had to reboot it to undo that, though I'm sure there's some other way). He was really mad when I separated him from it. Hilarious. For my usage, the keyboard is too small to touch type, and to get on the internet through my wrt54g I had to change to channel 11 (that took some serious googling to find) but otherwise I h...

While high on Vicodin after my knee surgery, I disobeyed the post-surgery advice that said not to make any big decisions and I purchased an XO Laptop through the Give One Get One program. I really should have written about this sooner, because now it's too late for me to talk anyone else into doing it with me. The program ended December 31st. I think I was feeling a bit guilty about spending the money, especially while under a pain-killer induced haze. I'm not usually that irresponsible! The more I learn about the laptop, though, the more the guilt is replaced with excitement. This is one freaking cool computer . The video of Ivan Krstic impressed me the most. Custom ASICs, extreme power management, and serious security (and he's from Croatia, where I lived for two years. Bok, Ivan!), what more could a geek want? Because I didn't order at the beginning of the G1G1 program I knew my laptop wouldn't be arriving in time for Christmas, but I was hoping m...