[OLPC.ch] Random notes about my XO

[Felix Rabe]

I got my XO through G1G1 around 1 February 2008, and I thought I'd share
some of what happened to it so far ;)

I dropped it three times by now - unintentionally - from about desk
height, always on concrete, but I thought "give it a nice crash test
sometime", so I think it got its fair share. :)  Don't misunderstand me:
I absolutely love that machine!  I won't do any more crash tests,
promised! :)

It survived them with just a few small scratches.  Whether my
intermittent keyboard troubles ('A' often turns to Ctrl-A without me
having Ctrl pressed - and similar stuff) are because of those crashes or
related to software, I haven't investigated yet, but I plan to take out
the screwdriver over the course of the next few days and find out about
the first option.

Right now, I am on my almost five-year-old main laptop and am running
Synergy - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ - on both this (server) and
the XO (client).  I had to go edit xorg.conf though before I had it
running (go Google).  (Just now, I made the XO's X11 crash by trying to
move my mouse cursor into it's screen, grr - I have to move my XO - read
on.)  I have the XO in it's "tablet position" leaning against the wall
and until a minute ago (until the crash) I had it ssh onto my main
laptop and 'top'-spy my processes for me ;)  It's like a second screen,
just with the power of a complete computer!  It's awesome.  Go try
Synergy when you have the time.

I have the devkey installed, maybe that enables me to turn off the
backlight upon booting, don't know.  (Is there a way to have it off by
default?  I don't need it in most situations.)  I noticed that when I
start it with the backlight off and X comes up, the display will be
low-res as if in color mode, but it is monochrome.  Kind of printing
monotone with colors...  If you turn on the backlight just a little bit
and back off, you get high resolution.

Another strangeness is that on the left side of the display, there seem
to be a few columns of pixels not getting properly activated when
starting X for the first time.  You don't have to restart X to get them
working as I did e.g. at OpenExpo (which asks for trouble, see below),
you can just switch to a console with Ctrl-Alt-F2 (⁂) and back with
Alt-F3 (⁎) and have those columns displaying.

Sweet workarounds for almost non-existant problems, no?

Restarting the X server led me to another problem: I use gedit on the
XO.  I love gedit.  I would choose it as my operating system of choice
over emacs anytime :P  But it depends on gconf.  After restarting X on
the XO, that dependancy often makes gedit yell strange messages at me
and not picking up / storing my preferences properly (which I'm of
course picky and bothered about), but then I found out that it randomly
goes that mad even *without* X getting restarted, so ... I'm working on
a lightweight (nano-like weight) gedit replacement.  Mostly for the sake
of Hebrew, I need Pango's Unicode support, otherwise I would just try to
make nano indent 4 spc a tab and use it more for my hacking hours.
Studying Theology somewhat forces an interest in displaying and entering
exotic languages on me ;) .

I mentioned the VocTrainer in my other email already.  I got requests by
fellow students to make it usable "by the general (student) public", so
I will sometime (for the other students I hope before summer) make it
show up on repo.or.cz and wiki.laptop.org.  At least it's on the (most
recent) TODO list...

I fought my battles with the Journal.  I would love to just get files
*easily* into / out of it from "normal filesystem space", but the other
day I copied some stuff from Journal to my USB stick in the last five
minutes that were left to do the copy operation (plenty of time, no?) -
just to find out on the other computer that I absolutely *can't* get a
hold of those copies *anyhow*.  I found the
/home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore/store directory on the XO, but
finding the copies on the USB stick?  Forget about it.  Maybe it's the
VFAT system's fault, maybe I had the blind spot of my eyes permanently
on the file.  Result: Not quite enough time to properly prepare my first
tentative preaching, but God heard my prayers and it didn't become all
that embarassing...  I eventually just copied the file from the store
directory, not via the Journal interface.  'ls -tr | tail -n 10' and
'file' are your friends.

If you have read this far, congrats and thanks for your patience :)
Hope to get in touch with you at the conference call.

- Felix

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