Comments on: Regular Linux desktops on the XO

By: Daniel Drake

Daniel Drake — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:29:58 +0000

Which OnDisk product are you referring to? I only had decent results with SanDisk cards, and I doubt OnDisk are using my process for installing Fedora. Perhaps you should try it before shooting it down. :)
FWIW, I survived off this setup for about a month in Ethiopia when my main laptop died. Very satisfactory results from a low spec system, but room for improvement, as always.

By: Douglas Goodall

Douglas Goodall — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:05:58 +0000

I bought the SD card from On-Disk. I had no joy until I tried booting up the normal sugar environment. Then I ran su to become the root. I then created a /security directory on the SDcard and put the developer key there. Booting worked a little better after that. Still everything seems very unstable and very sluggish. The system crashed (locks up) a lot at various random times and places. In my opinion, this is unstable and unusable as things are today. I understand that SD cards cost money and that is why On-Disk is selling these things, but as a product the system is not usable and paying cash for something this unstable seems wrong to me. It would have made a lot more sense to have sold SD cards of the right specification and made software available for download with utilities to init the SDcard properly for booting. I have only managed to boot the system once and it crashed after I configured the wifi. I have been unable to get back to that place in the subsequent 4 hours. It looks to me like the only valuable thing I have learned so far is to make the directory and put the key there so booting starts at all. Aside from that I wish I had better news.

By: Venera

Venera — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:58:13 +0000

Nice idea, grazie!

By: Rita

Rita — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:30:10 +0000

I did not think, that it can be real..

By: Morad

Morad — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:24:25 +0000

Looks easy enough, but I am getting error messages, perhaps I am doing something wrong? I want to create an Intrepid system and followed the instructions (first installed the SD card from the Intrepid alpha 4 live cd, then booted on an Ubuntu 8.04 system to apply your patch). However when I execute the sd_fixup command, after checking out the files, error messages start to appear, as follows:

…
Checking out files: 100% (8671/8671), done.
HEAD is now at cc866cf… OLPC: psmouse: don’t race with irq/resync handlers when recalibrating
make: Entering directory `/home/morad/XO-alt-distro/build/kernel’
HOSTCC scripts/basic/fixdep
scripts/basic/fixdep.c:107:23: error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory
… (many more error messages, ends with make kerner error 512)

By: jimson

jimson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:38:57 +0000

I don’t suppose you’ve noticed that suspending and resuming with any of these breaks. A half-assed install like this is useless.

By: sparc

sparc — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:23:10 +0000

@bronson: yes .. you can use USB

By: gNewSense

gNewSense — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:30:00 +0000

I’d like to run gNewSense on the XO-1, but I’d prefer to use the gNewSense kernel as all of the non-free parts have been removed.

Is there a way to make the gNewSense kernel run on the OLPC?

Thanks.

By: Jim Gettys

Jim Gettys — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:50:38 +0000

It will take a different olpc.fth file for booting off of usb. Make the obvious changes….

By: bronson

bronson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:51:53 +0000

What about using a USB drive? The XO has USB ports, can we use them for the install?

Thanks for your hard work, I’ll be following closely.