[OLPC-Chicago] XO help in Oak Park

[Robert Myers]

Jeffrey,

I can give you some guidance on a couple of these.

> -Play media from an SD card

As a general rule, don't. The XOs SD slot is meant as a semi-permanent 
plug-in to increase storage space, not as a convenience card slot. The 
slot is semi-concealed and weather-covered. The more exposed USB slots 
are meant for more casual plugins. Transfer your files to a thumb-drive 
first. Or try plugging in a USB Multi-card reader. I haven't tried one 
yet, but the XO reads my digital camera over USB just fine.

If you want to find a file to play, and have the appropriate decoders to 
play it in the browser, you can use the browser to browse the file 
system to locate the file. SD cards or USB cards will show up in the 
file system as /media/name, where name is the name of your drive. If the 
drive has not been named it will be a name of the form xxxx-xxxx, where 
the 'x's are hex digits (e.g. '1234-9ABC').

> -Learn how to install programs that I am reading about to make the XO a
> little easier to use (for example - Opera)

Much of what you need is on the OLPC wiki. For example, info about Opera 
is at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Opera. The Opera port is seriously cool, 
but it was done to satisfy a potential customer's request. So there has 
bee a single build and it hasn't been updated for quite some time.

> -If possible, would love to be able to use a program like GOTOMTPC to
> connect to my home PC

Sorry, I'm not a GoToMyPC user. However it's web page says that the 
universal client will work with a Linux machine with Firefox 2, and 
Java. The Browse activity is based on Firefox, and Java can be installed 
on the XO. So it _may_ work. I've got one gotcha -- I've installed Java 
on my XO, and it works fine as Java. However, I haven't yet gotten the 
Java plugin to work in Browse. I don't know why -- it should. This could 
be a fun project to tackle, take the lead. No matches for GoToMyPC on 
the OLPC wiki.

Always remember rule number one of the XO. You are not the customer. The 
XO is great fun, and stretching it's capabilities towards our first 
world tasks can be entertaining (believe me, I've gone further than 
most), but when it comes down to it, it just won't be happy trying to do 
a lot of things that you'd think that it should be able to do with no 
problems. If in the end, you are disappointed that it can't do this, 
that, or the other thing that a more 'normal' box can, remember, it does 
a lot of things for its real audience that nothing else can. And that's 
what it's about.

Bob