Entries tagged “xo”

Turning on WPA encryption for wireless access points on the XO laptop. WPA is expected to be available as an official feature of the XO next month, but impatient G1G1 owners can copy a script over with a USB stick and run it.

USB ethernet adapters are also known to work.

A new tutorial on application development for the OLPC XO laptop from IBM developerWorks. Registration required to see the tutorial. Nice to see a fresh tutorial, since XO development has changed drastically in the last 8 months.

OLPC has set up a nice getting started guide and a support page for the XO laptop, as well as a support FAQ. Things are still clearly in their early stages: the Give1Get1 laptops are shipping with software with known issues (no WPA wifi, no sleep feature, no printing) that will be addressed in a software update in the near future. But the newest photos and screenshots make it look pretty slick.

G1G1 participants should start receiving their laptops this week on a first-come first-serve basis. The G1G1 program runs through December 31st, so you'll still be able to jump in after reading dozens of reviews from other G1G1 participants.

XO Development: Running Sugar on a Mac

The XO laptop runs a custom version of Linux with drivers and libraries for the fancy hardware and an impressive simple user interface called Sugar. For getting a sense of what it's like, or for developing applications that don't necessarily need the fancy hardware, you can run the XO operating system in an emulator. The general recommendation is to use Qemu, a free PC emulator for several operating systems, with the latest image.

I couldn't get build 625 (the latest as of this writing) to work with the Mac port of Qemu, called "Q": I could create my user account, but then X would crash and restart repeatedly. I had a similar-looking issue using the 625 build directly with Parallels 3.0 and this old technique of creating an empty VM and replacing its hard drive with the .img file (already reported not to work with recent builds).

Thankfully, Bert Freudenberg got it working it Parallels and offers build 623 as a Parallels VM. It works great, and anyone with Parallels Desktop, an Intel Mac and the interest should download the VM and give it a whirl.

For serious Sugar Activity (application) development, a good option for Mac users with Parallels is to create a VM and install Fedora Linux: Download an install DVD ISO image and tell Parallels 3.0 that you want to install the OS from the image when Parallels asks. I had a weird issue where the first time 'round it couldn't find an obvious .rpm file on the image, but stopping the VM, setting the options to boot from the "CD" image again, and restarting the installation procedure finished it fine.

Once Fedora is set up, run these commands to install a few more packages, and don't forget the final sudo yum install popt-devel if you're running Fedora 8. My Fedora 8 install didn't give my user account sudoers access by default, so I just jumped to superuser mode with su then ran those commands. Also, there have been 137+ package updates since Fedora 8, so expect the first sudo yum -y update to take a while.

Once all the packages are installed, proceed to these instructions for using sugar-jhbuild. The result is not the full XO software suite—not all of the XO's default applications are part of the default developer source for Sugar—but it's enough to get started with developing Sugar apps.

More XO emulation options. More Sugar options, including running Sugar on Mac OS X native, which sounds tricky, provides no advice for running PyGTK on a Mac (I assume X11 is involved), and even includes a little diatribe at the end on how setting up a development environment ought to be easier.

The OLPC Foundation has extended their Give 1 Get 1 program through December 31st.

6 days remaining for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop Give 1 Get 1 program. As mentioned here previously, Give 1 Get 1 means you pay $399 for 2 units, one of them goes to you and the other goes to charity. The $200 charity portion is tax deductible, and gift matchable.

T-Mobile pledges 1 year of free wi-fi hotspot use to all Give 1 Get 1 Participants.

Also mentioned here before, but I'll link it again because it's a great brief intro: David Pogue's video review of the XO. Not linked here before, an April '07 Google TechTalk on some of the technical aspects of the XO.

I'm looking forward to sharing my XO with my kids. After I've had a chance to play with it, of course. Maybe I should have ordered 2 after all... Or 3...