User:Rostauber

OLPC you can ignore my email the day after I opened my XO-1. Somewhere in the wiki I had thought I read what I though said my G1G1 XO-1 was "no longer supported". So I emailed for help commenting i felt a little had. Also the XO right off struck me as tedius in some crucial areas ... which frustration I am dutifully overcoming. And naturally we USA softies are concerned about a program which is determined to put third-world children at a console and cruising the OLPC Community rather than growing strong in leg and arm and spirit relative to their own real community and family experiences And their eyes will suffer. But be that as it may, I feel OLPC people on the ground anywhere in the world will be promnotional to other progressive efforts there.

As little XO-1 works its magic and I am working with it constantly into wiki and further than expected in Forth lessons, let me say right now I do not intend to spend my remaining years reading code. I want to participate though, and passing through stages of understanding based on use of the XO-1 and wiki and the Community is indispensible to my usefulness, and what any child or adult would face.

(Comment: I am getting to love your keyboard but why isn't it glo-in-the-dark or lit by two little leds? Without power management I use the hi-contrast often sometimes lighted up one notch. I'm getting shortcuts down. BUT no "alt-left" to backup and "alt-right" to go forward? And what made me think I wAS GETTING A TOUCH-SCREEN WHEN i SENT OFF THAT $400 PLUS? Why can't DELETE be DELETE in any context? And a manageable and saved "Favorites" list instead of all that Journal. I look forward to the SD Microsoft for favorites and XP-like shortcuts.

Just introducing myself in this depuiction of where I'm at and what comes to my mind. At 71 my short term memory sometimes leaves me at a loss for what I am trying to do but only when I am standing and moving about which is how I was positioned all my life when I did those things which fed my ego and self-esteem. It will be interesting if navigating the wiki (let alone trying a little code insertion) improves my focus.

I was slow figuring out Dos "Mode". I always taught little batch files when, as Bookroom clerk at a public HS when the IBM's came into the buildings and nobody including me knew how they worked, I was self-taught and got on top of Lotus quick doing lost-book lists for the students (to save them $20-35 bucks a pop) and doing the school budget and inventory data input and reports.

So much for the past. What I want to do is participate in a spearhead action introducing the XO-1 in Soulard (STL) MO USA which is even now gentrifying quite nicely thank you ... more and more infants, lots more dogs on leashes, people with real jobs. I have time, resourses, commercial and residential property, space therein, and a gadgets fetish. I recognize OLPC prefers skilled self-starters who will manage their own shit ... oh yes, I also have a lot of shit that I've wanted to eBay for a few years which would easily make cash AND living space as our little XIO-1 starter group would be seeking to justify and debug itself. I feel I can make assurances that I am overcoming any initial dissatisfactions with the hardware. But I like the idea of a rubber case as a better seal, and a shock absorber. But please make it grey ... dark grey would be nice. AND a personal alarm do-dad so one can locate one's own XO in the pile?

I'm rather old now and there's less reason for me to get excited about the problems in the world. But I think USA citizen having an accurate interest in OLPC based on USA citizen sharing hands-on skill with the XO as a learning tool would promote USA confidence in the OLPC Project and the OLPC Community, (to sing to the choir) and as various forms of resistance even competitors' sabotage may appear intentionally or not ... us getting connected and knowledgable here in soft old USA could well be of crucial importance in the short term success of the Project now that the 1-Gig miricle has been born. Hopefully a free-laptop-to-students craze will spread everywhere as children with such an opportunity come of age and work some non-partisan activities out in the society. Probably be more like a cell-phone though, wireless to the TV and sporting a roll-out keyboard.

I was delighted to make my own (2GB) USB Key stick yesterday, and eventually I put OS653 on over 650. Is 653 stable, or just official? Can I get back to 650 if I put the 650 .zip and .img files on the stick? Will XO play dumb and take it? Just trying to indicate my level of exposure and drum up some local contact perhaps lead to some OLPC activity in STL and perhaps some adults and teens from STL heading for the field to help with whatever is going on in that location, water or food, housing, transportation, things about which we Americans have learned to expect and provide for ourselfes in our soft secure and weakening urban world, arriving under the banner of OLPC.

Wish there was a better file manager than Journal. Should I start dabbling in Terminal? That's not what I want to do if you please. I'll take the monthly CD with the monthly array of interesting utilities, gadgets, fixes and shortcuts, and I would hope some new shortcuts such as Journal erasure and uninstalling of individual base activities. Who's working on that? A guy on eBay claims the XO-1 will USB a printer. Is he uninformed? XOs still bring over 500 on eBay but they also go for under 300 regularly. I can pass out all I can get.

I need a DOS-like file manager, where you can rename, copy and delete, without going into Terminal, and even make a little "batch" (.bat) type file on the root. And can Linux do anything like Dir/p/ogn or /ogs?