[Olpc-open] Looking for an xo user support/community mailer

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Paul Russell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my G1G1 XO laptop and it got me 
> thinking that I might have a question or two or be able to help out 
> fellow users once I get familiar with the XO.
> 
> Is there a community mailer for users to ask questions, provide each 
> other support and share experiences with using the XO laptop?

One thing that occurred to me over the weekend was that everyone who 
signed up for a G1G1 that can do so might well want to download an image 
and run it in Qemu or VMware, or install Fedora 7 or 8 and jhbuild. I 
did both jhbuild and VMware images of "joyride" and "ship2", and spent a 
few hours Sunday using the XO "chat" application over the Internet!

The instructions on the Wiki are a tad cryptic, but I managed to get 
things to work with a few hours of experimentation. I don't know what 
the bandwidth is of the server that supports chat -- there were only 
about 10 or 15 people tops in my neighborhood yesterday. Next weekend 
I'm going to try to get the audio to work in a VMware image.

Incidentally, my areas of expertise are mostly in computer music 
(CSound, for example), mathematical software (adult versions -- R, Blas, 
LAPACK, Maxima, etc.) and Linux kernel performance tuning. Unfortunately 
I have virtually no Python skills and negative Squeak skills -- I can 
actually lower the productivity of an accomplished Squeak programmer 
just by being in the room with him or her. ;)

There used to be VMware images on the web somewhere, but in the rush 
towards shipment, they seem to have been abandoned in favor of Qemu and 
jhbuild. If there's enough interest, I'll hack up an image (with a 
slightly larger disk capacity than the standard ones -- it's so small 
you can't install VMware Tools.)