Updating my OLPC XO laptop

For a few months my XO laptop was my primary personal machine. I've written before about some of my favorite features, and after a year and a half with it, my favorites are still:

• A screen that is readable in full sunlight or glare
• Linux
• Long battery life
• Runs absolutely silently, no fans or spinning hard drive

However, there were a few drawbacks. It is a bit short on ram and processing power but most of the time I'm using simple programming tools, so I don't need much. Web browsing on some sites was a bit slow though. The biggest pain point in my book was the lack of copy and paste capability. I often found myself needing to retype a lengthy command in the terminal. On other systems I would have just copied and pasted from the web browser. For a while, I worked around this by using screen, which has a built in copy-paste buffer.

It turns out, in a recent release, the OLPC team has assuaged my number one annoyance. It is now possible to copy text from any of the activities (programs) and paste into another (like the terminal). In order to use this new goodness, I needed to update my XO operating system from the current version (656) to a newer build (802).

The process of updating turned out to be quite simple. If you are undertaking these same steps, please note, this does wipe out some parts of the operating system. New programs which you've installed using yum or rpm's might be erased depending on where they are installed. It looks like everything in the /home/olpc directory is untouched. For complete instructions, see the laptop.org wiki page for olpc-update.

To update, open the terminal and become root by executing

su

After that, make sure that your laptop is plugged in to a source of electricity and connected to the internet as this next step involved downloading the new operating system and overwriting your existing OS. Probably not something you want to lose power during.

To download and install the new OS run

/usr/sbin/olpc-update 802

Once you run this your laptop will spend the next several minutes to hours downloading and installing. A few exciting status messages will appear on your screen. Things like "Deleting old pristine version" - yikes!

I've found 802 to be a significant improvement over 656. The copy paste functionality is great and the UI looks and feels cleaner. Selecting applications and switching between them is easier than it used to be. With copy and paste now firmly in place I plan to use my little green machine quite a bit more.

In Praise of screen

I've used screen for a few years now, but I only recently learned about one of its highly helpful features. As I was using my XO laptop in text only mode (ctrl-alt-fn-2), I was using screen to simulate multiple terminals, and I needed to copy and paste text between them. In the past, I've usually used screen when ssh-ing into a machine, and putty (my ssh client of choice) provided copy and paste, so I had never needed screen's system.

It turns out, screen's built-in, cross-window copy-paste system is a breeze to use. Press ctrl-a [ to enter copy mode, press enter to mark the start point and enter again to mark the end point. You have now copied the text. Switch to the desired window, and paste in the text using ctrl-a ].

This feature is especially handy in the XO laptop, where I've never been able to figure out how to copy and paste in the Terminal Activity.

For me, screen's most useful feature has been the ability to detach and reattach to a session which continues to run on the server. If I lose my ssh connection, all of my processes continue to run, and I can reattach to my screen session as if nothing ever happened.

Screen can be difficult to understand if you've never seen it in action, so I recommend watching this video. You can also learn more in this tutorial.

XO Give One Get One - Round Two

As I was looking for some information on running the XO laptop in text mode, I stumbled across this page in the OLPC wiki:

One Laptop per Child is launching its second 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program starting in November, 2008, delivering its XO Laptop globally via Amazon.com. Although the first iteration of the 'G1G1' program was extremely successful and sold more than 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

The laptop's operating system will be Linux-based (it will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports).

If you've been thinking about getting one of these little green machines, it looks like the window will open once again. I wrote about the program last year. (Here is a list of all posts I've made on the XO Laptop.)

As for running in text mode, I've settled for using the terminal by pressing ctrl-fn-alt-1. To switch back to the normal view. press ctrl-fn-alt-3. For some reason, I can only start screen as root.

Opera on the XO Laptop

No I'm not talking about singing.

I was looking forward to the release of Firefox 3 with great anticipation. I had tried out the beta versions and noticed the improvements in JavaScript execution speed and memory footprint. Since the XO laptop is relatively slow and memory constrained compared to many of the other computers that I work with, I was really hoping that Firefox 3 would be a big improvement over Firefox 2. It turns out, for the XO, it wasn't. The place where the limitations were most apparent, was scrolling on a large web page. The page would hang for a second or so and then slowly creep down. It probably had to do with the short supply of available RAM on my happy little green machine.

As momentum was building for Firefox 3, I started to hear good things about Opera 9.51. When I ran into performance issues on Firefox and the XO, I decided to give Opera a try. Some thought I was crazy since, as Arne mentioned, the XO can be a bit slow. Yes, the XO laptop is a different environment than most other computers out there, and Opera has turned out to be an improvement.

To set up Opera on the XO, I began by downloading from the Opera web site. I selected Opera 9.51 for Linux i386, selected RedHat as the distribution in the drop down menu, then I selected RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9 and checked the box to Download this package in TAR.GZ format. Whew.



Next, unpack the archive using

tar zxvf opera-9.51.gcc4-static-qt3.i386.tar.gz

and then run

install.sh -s

From there, you can just type opera on the command line in the terminal to start it up.

XO Laptop

My XO laptop arrived in the mail recently and it is quite an amazing little machine. Conclusion up front: I'm extremely satisfied with it and in some ways this laptop computer is better than ones that sell for ten times the price.

You might recall from a previous post that I had downloaded the XO's operating system and taken it for a test drive in an emulator. Now I have the real thing in front of me, and it's safe to say that it is even better. After all, some of the most innovative features of this computer are in the hardware. My favorite feature is the screen. It is viewable in direct sunlight which makes it usable outdoors. Second up would be the wireless networking. The graphical network selector is fun to use and the connection tends to be more reliable than any of the other computers I've used with my home wireless router. The battery life is also impressive, easily five hours on a charge of its small battery. It even has a built-in camera and microphone.

It runs all of the software I need too. I used the instructions I wrote up when I installed firefox on the emulated operating system. Everything went smoothly and I was browsing the web using firefox in a few minutes (The XO laptop comes with a perfectly good web browser, but I wanted to use my favorite plugins and have more control over downloads).

I'm quite taken with the little machine. I've been using it as my primary computer at home, using it for all of the tasks I normally do (mostly browsing the web and programming). There are a couple of things that I would change if I had the chance. The first is the keyboard. It is an interesting design, made of a flexible rubber-like substance, and it works much better than other flexible keyboard that I've tried, but it took a while to get used to the shift key (I have to press in the corner of the key). The other difficulty is presented by the slower processor, but it doesn't get in my way most of the time. The only time I notice any slowness is when playing flash videos (like on YouTube). Perhaps part of the problem is flash for Linux, but I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really mind as I don't watch that much video, and if I want to, I have other computers that I can use.

It will probably come as no surprise that I wrote this post using the little green computer. I'm saddened by the end of the "give one get one" program, as I think there is still the opportunity for more people to donate and receive their own XO. If anyone is interested, it might be possible to order a batch of one hundred or more through the "give many" program.

Trying out the XO Laptop Operating System

In a recent post I mentioned that I had ordered an XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program. It is still on order but being the slightly impatient person that I am I decided to see if I could test drive the software on the laptop before it arrives. It is based on Linux after all which usually means the software is freely available somewhere on the Internet.

Taking the XO for a spin turned out to be pretty easy and I have been able to add all of the applications I've wanted so far. I mentioned in my last post about the XO that I wanted to use it for programming and web browsing so I had a few requirements in mind. The laptop comes preinstalled with a custom web browser and Python but I often like to program in C and C++ so I wanted to install gcc. The web browser has a few wrinkles too, in the development build I tested I wasn't able to get some flash plugins to load (could be the version of flash or the fact that the XO version I downloaded wasn't a production release). The browser is tabless and it is a bit difficult (though not impossible) to figure out where downloaded files are stored. In short it wasn't quite was I've grown accustomed to, so I thought I would try installing Firefox. He's my step by step instructions for trying out the XO Laptop virtually and customizing it.

I began with the XO's wiki and found out that there are instructions for emulating the XO and VMWare virtual machine images for recent builds of the system. VMWare is a program which creates a simulated computer that runs within your current operating system. For the past few years I've tested all of the Linux distributions I've considered on VMWare Server (free to download and use at home). Once I started VMWare, I opened the ship.2-OLPC-655.vmx file and started it up.

After the initial configuration, I wanted to add gcc, a collection of open source compilers. I thought it was going to involve downloading several RPM files, but I found out about a tool called yum which manages RPM packages. This is similar to Ubuntu's apt-get. As root I was able to run

yum install gcc

and it downloaded and installed all prerequisites.

Next I wanted to install Firefox, and to download it I thought I would try Lynx (a text based web browser). Installing Lynx was just as easy, as root I ran:

yum install lynx

I ran lynx www.google.com and searched for firefox and downloaded the tar.gz Linux version. After downloading I unpacked the archive using

tar zxvf firefox-2.0.0.11.tar.gz

I tried running firefox, but got an error about a missing shared object library. Yum was able to find this as well. One final time as root, I ran

yum install libstdc++.so.5

After installing the C++ library, firefox ran just fine. The menus and graphics in Firefox matched the XO's theme, which I thought was pretty nifty. I was also able to install Flash. Well there you have it, why not take it for a test drive yourself.

One Laptop Per Child, Give One Get One

If you are looking for a cheap, power efficient, portable laptop for wireless web browsing and programming, like I was, consider the XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child association. I ordered one to keep and one as a donation through the Give One Get One program. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, I'm especially interested in the wireless mesh networking and social aspects to using the laptop. Some of the the music software looks like fun as well.

I'm ordering one for mostly selfish reasons, but this is probably my first computer purchase which will benefit someone else. Who knows, perhaps a child in a developing nation will discover a new world of seemingly limitless possibilities through programming just like I did as a child. This is my personal take on the vision behind this unique program. The opportunity to order one is slipping away fast, the offer to buy one and give one away ends December 31st. Let me know if you've ordered one, perhaps we can organize a laptop party (Arne I'm looking at you ;-)