Talk:DebXO

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Revision as of 19:59, 13 December 2009 by 129.97.53.95 (talk) (DebXO-awesome.ext3.img clues for dummies would be helpful)
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I'm having some issues with debxo 0.3.

1) I wanted to have a login name of quixote, but when I changed it, using "usermod -L quixote olpc", the shutdown gui ceased working again. Could this be related to the earlier issue, in 0.2, that prevented shutdown from working? I've switched it back to "olpc" but shutdown still doesn't work. Hibernate generates error messages and aborts back to regular "on" mode.

2) Trying to establish a new user resulted in lots of things not being set up, such as wireless networking. Is there a simple way to set up another user just like the "olpc" user?

3) I gather "zcat" does a raw write, because my 16GB SD HC became a 2GB SD with lots of unallocated space. Maybe it would be good to let people know they'll have unallocated space with a card or thumbdrive larger than 2GB. I set it up as my new /home partition and am enjoying all the oceans of space!

Other than those issues, I'm finding debxo to be stable. It boots up quite quickly. And the install, with that nice little zcat command I'd never seen before, couldn't be simpler.

Thanks!

DebOX USB Not Readable

I followed the instruction zcat debxo-awesome.ext3.img.gz > /dev/sdc1 where /dev/sdc1 is a 4 GB USB disk. My olpc can't read it and wont boot from it. At startup I press Esc and get the ok prompt. The boot command and the dir u:\ command say the usb disk is unreadable.

I can mount the usb disk on my Lenny box with mount -o loop,offset=16384 -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /media/linuxkey and have added a directory security and copied my developer key there. While mounted df - h shows only 740 M of the 1.9 G partition is used.

cfdisk /dev/sdc1 shows the partition is bootable and has the label DebXO but will not allow me to maximize it although it shows 2039.42 M free space. I could make a new partition to use the free space but it seems more logical to have a single 4 G partition.

At any rate, what is wrong?

My bad - just realized that should be /dev/sdc not /dev/sdc1. Awesome boots but to gray screen with no keyboard response. I'm trying gnome next.

OK, gnome is awesome. Many thanks for all the work that went into these images, its great keep olpc and also have debox.

Can DebX0 Use XO Wireless Adapter?

I have booted debxo-gnome from a usb drive, opened a root terminal and tried setting iwconfig parameters - our LAN uses static ip addresses. Signal strength is good but no connection. Have others had success? If so, how?

DebXO-awesome.ext3.img clues for dummies would be helpful

My vote for the most useful window manager concept for an adult geek's XO-1 is the awesome wm. However, with all the recent development of this wm, its manuals and the "tutorials for dummies" for it have not caught up with the latest development of the software which has changed significantly. Basic instructions for getting started in DebXO-awesome are terse. Some more instructions or a link to some instructions and clues would be useful, especially because of the default font sizes and the question of how to connect to the network.

In the (0.5) DebXO-awesome.ext3.img the fonts in the terminals are tiny and barely readable with effort while the fonts in the windowed programs are massive and waste much screen space. I am barely able to read the text in the terminal and the help files to try to figure out how to fix the fonts and how to get onto the network. Which file(s) do I edit (create?) to change the fonts? How do I connect to the network? (Admittedly it is looking a gift-horse in the mouth to expect that an image created for the XO-1 would have the font sizes setup correctly and an easy to find help file for connecting to the internet, though possibly that would be easier to do than the effort of explaining how to change the font sizes.)

Given that the mouse pad on the XO-1s is still only semi useable, the rodent-free approach of the awesume wm fits the XO and its 1200x900 display quite well. If I were bored and had time I would be interested in creating an even more vi-like interface for the wm where a single keypress, (much as vi uses "esc") puts the windowmanager into command mode, waiting for a single keypress command to manipulate the wm or move the mouse curser. This would be more flexible and easier to use with the small keyboard than trying to press two or three keys at a time on the tiny keyboard to input a wm command.

==== DebXO-0.5 uses awesome v2.3.3 which uses the "libconfuse" configuration library (http://www.nongnu.org/confuse/). (Much different from v3 which writes the configuration file in the Lua programming language, or v1 which used the libconfig library from dwm.