User:NeoAmsterdam

Chronology

• G1G1 donor 2007
• Introduced to OLPC via Lilug (sp. by J5's demo at LILUG)
• XO received on 2008/Mar/21 and it survived graduate school
  (a bit dirty and the battery life's reduced a bit, but otherwise intact)
• As of 2009/Sep/03, trying to figure out what caused the battery to fail (XO still functions on AC adapter)The battery sprang back to life on 2010/Jan/07, and I'm trying to figure out why.
• 2010/Feb/12: Revising the usage notes on this page (should be completed in a few days).

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Usage Notes

So that others can enhance their XO experience (read: fix all those pains in the root), I'm listing here a few tweaks that I've employed.

Installing a Text Editor

All of the following tweaks will need a text editor, such as emacs, vi, pico, or nano. You will also need a bit of command prompt savvy, such as cd, cp, and the meaning of ~/.

If your preferred text editor is not available, you can install it using yum as follows:

1. Open the Terminal activity
2. Click the Activity tab at the top of the Terminal window
3. Click the Become Root button in the upper right-hand side of the Activity tab
   If your build does not have the Become Root button, type su to become the root user
4. Type yum list "*name of text editor to be searched*" and press
   This will search through the list of ready-made programs (also called "precompiled binaries") to see if your preferred text editor is available for installation.
   There may be varieties of your preferred text editor available for installation. Keep in mind that graphical versions of programs will run at a high resolution and be less legible as a result (I'm thinking specifically of xemacs, emacs, and emacs-nox).
   For the record, I installed emacs-nox.
5. When you've found your preferred text editor in the list, type yum install "name of text editor to be installed" and press
   The XO will make sure that all the programs that your text editor needs will be installed as well. Once that phase is complete, yum will ask for your approval of its to-do list.
6. When yum completes the installation, type exit and press to return to your normal user status.

Your text editor should now be available from the command prompt. If you have installed an editor other than emacs, use its name in the instructions instead.

IRC	Nick: NeoAmsterdam #olpc #sugar

XoIRC

Setting the Default Nickname

XoIRC's page states that "to make your default IRC nickname match your default XO nickname" you can apply a patch, but it appears (as of 2008-01-11) that the link to the patch is dead. Here's how to get around it:

1. Open the Terminal activity
2. Locate XoIRC.activity/ folder.
   I found it at ~/Activites/XoIRC.activity/, but it may be stored elsewhere on your XO.
3. cd path to/XoIRC.activity/purk/
4. emacs irc.py
5. Look for a line that reads nicks = [user_nick]
   I found it on line 71.
6. Insert the following on the line immediately afterwards: nicks = [your preferred nickname]
7. Save the file and exit your editor.
   XoIRC will now use your preferred nickname.

Note that your IRC server may complain about your chosen nickname if the nickname had been registered or is in use by someone else. This workaround does not address that potential problem.

Setting the Default IRC Server and Channel

XoIRC will connect to irc.freenode.net by default. Even though XoIRC is based on urk, XoIRC seems to have disabled support for the urk.conf configuration file. Moreover, urk's documentation states that its settings can be altered with /pyeval statements in the IRC text input window. This also seems to have been disabled. Here's how to get around this limitation:

1. Open the Terminal activity
2. Locate XoIRC.activity/ folder.
   I found it at ~/Activites/XoIRC.activity/, but it may be stored elsewhere on your XO.
3. cd path to/XoIRC.activity/
4. emacs xoircactivity.py
5. Look for a line that reads client.join_server('irc.freenode.net')
   I found it on line 37.
6. Change the contents of the line to read client.join_server('your preferred IRC server')
7. Look for a line that reads client.add_channel('#olpc-help')
8. Change the contents of the line to read client.join_server('#channel on server') to automatically join on startup.
   I have not tested XoIRC without this line, but I suspect that commenting out this line (by beginning the line with a #) will trip up XoIRC and cause it to crash.
9. Save the file and exit your editor.
   XoIRC will now use your preferred IRC server and autojoin you to your preferred channel.

You can tell XoIRC to autojoin other channels from within the program by right-clicking a channel's tab and selecting Autojoin

Automating NickServe/Identifications

I haven't figured that out yet. You will have to /msg NickServ manually.

Mini vMac

Changing the Default Disk Image

Still figuring it out, but it probably involves MiniVMac.activity/bin/minivmacactivity . If not, overwriting the supplied disk image may be the only other option.