debxo 0.1 release

[Andres Salomon]

Hi,

For a while, I've been running Gnome and Debian on my XO.  It's worked
quite well, but installation has always been a pain.  Some time ago I
wrote scripts to generate ext3 and jffs2 images for the XO, but never
got around to publish the images.  I took some time over the past few
days to clean things up, update them, and test.

DebXO-0.1 allows you to install Debian (lenny) and Gnome easily on your
XO.  It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's perfectly usable (I'm
typing this email from within claws on it).

It can be downloaded from here:

http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/debxo/

The git repository can be downloaded via:

git clone git://queued.mit.edu/git/xodist/

Once you've downloaded the .img and .crc files, stick them onto a
USB stick, boot into OpenFirmware, and run
'copy-nand disk:\debxo-0.1.jffs2.img'.  Reboot, and everything should
work.  You'll automatically be logged in as user 'olpc'; there is no
password on this account.  Root logins are disabled.  User 'olpc' is
allowed to sudo.  If you'd like to set a password for either account,
switch to a tty (ctrl-alt-1, for example), log in with username 'olpc',
and run 'sudo passwd <user>'.

I find it perfectly usable; with gnome running, I typically have 140MB
of ram free.  The two biggest memory hogs are epiphany (and other
gecko-based browsers) and evince.  DebXO includes links2 and xpdf, both
of which make fine, low-memory alternatives (run 'links2 -g' for
graphics).

There are lots of bugs in this.  Please don't report them right now,
unless they are accompanied by fixes/patches/suggested workarounds.
The ext3 image isn't ready for release due to kernel issues; it
will be released later.

Have fun!