[Olpc-open] Problems with 8.2

[Tom Stewart]

Let me start by saying that I love this project, and I love the little  
laptops. I'm the father of three children, and last year I bought two  
XO's through the G1G1 program. (By the way, I much prefer the GOGO!  
acronym for the program). The kids like the laptops, too, although in  
a house full of computers, they often choose to use the bigger, faster  
ones instead :-(. Another stumbling block has been the wireless. They  
have always had a hard time connecting to the wireless network  
provided by the ActionTec router that came with our FiOS service,  
which is setup with WPA2. It would prompt over and over and over again  
for the password that was (or should have been?!) stored on the  
computer. Sometimes, you could type in the pw 20 times with no  
success. Sometimes, it would seem as though letting the computer sit  
idle for 5 minutes would let you get on the network. These  
difficulties certainly discouraged the kids from using them.

So it was with great anticipation that I installed the 8.2 update on  
both. The wireless connected the first time. But then, on subsequent  
attempts, not so much. It was back to the old behavior. And, btw,  
these were clean installs, so there should have been nothing old left  
around somehow confusing things. Upon further investigation, I came  
across a wiki page that mentioned setting the FiOS router up to use a  
static channel rather than let it float. But apparently, I had  
discovered that earlier, because when I went to make the change, the  
router was already configured to use channel 6. I have a hard time  
understanding how this could still be a problem after all this time,  
and am somewhat discouraged by it. That said, if there is something I  
can do to capture good, useful debugging information on one of the  
laptops, let me know, and I'll do it. I assumed (heh) that I couldn't  
be the only XO family with FiOS using WPA2 on the ActionTec router.  
Perhaps I am. I'm ready to help now :-)

One solution I was hoping for was to setup a school server at home,  
with the OLPC approved wireless network adapters, but that idea has  
been squashed (ref. an earlier msg from me). Anyway, it has always  
been my intention to replace Verizon's router, so I've done that with  
a Linksys running dd-wrt, which the XO's connect to with no problem.  
At the moment, it's just running wide open, but I am reasonably  
confident that when I add security to the mix, it will all still work.

Two other issues: since this update I have seen (exactly one time thus  
far) erratic behavior with the touchpad. This was a pretty big issue  
early on, and I thought it was solved, but wanted folks to know that  
it's still lurking. Finally, the cached wikipedia activity seems  
extremely slow, taking more than a minute to bring up a page after  
clicking on a link. Is it possible that this is related to not having  
a network connection?? Part of me hopes not, in that clearly the whole  
point of the local copy is to have the reference material there even  
when you have no internet; the other part of me hopes that it is,  
because I can't believe that it got released in its current state if  
that's the way it works for everyone.

Oh, one last question: when will the side parts of the touchpad (the  
stylus activated drawing pad) be usable?