User:Dulcan/Alvin hints and questions

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This page is a running review of what I found out on the XO laptop beginning December 21, 2007. I purchased the laptop with 20 friends at work in the 2 for 1 deal. The information was obtained through trying it out and various help pages on http://laptop.org and http://wiki.laptop.org. Feel free to contribute to help us laearn more about using the laptop. This document was started with vi in the Terminal Activity and copied to the Write Activity using the Browser Activity to see the file system. It was, in turn, copied to this page. Liberal use was made of ctrl-a to select all, ctrl-c to copy, and ctrl-v to paste. All of the editing was performed with the XO laptop.See also at the bottom of the page has useful links.

Burning Questions

  • Collaboration: How do I gt together with other laptop owners in Fremont, Palo Alto, or Mountain View, California? I expect a lot of people from Google bought it, so I can probably go there.
  • How to switch the screen between color to black and white
  • How to copy and paste in the Terminal Activity?
  • When will we geet a print capbility, maybe lpr.

Needs to be Investigated

  • Find the preliminary manual (maybe in FAQ)
  • See what the kids have done so far (Peru)

- document what you can do in the terminal (find, vi, screen capture - still need to copy and paste in terminal - copy to from vi, write, online apps, usb - how to switch to black and white mode vs color mode - how do you listen to an mp3 file downloaded from the web

Journal Activity

  • This should be the focus for running the activities
  • It is best to resume a journal entry to reduce the numbr of entries.
  • Clean up is slow because you can only delete journal entries one at a time.

Questions/Problems

  • What does the * mean in the journal? In gmail, a star can be selected as an object for an action

General

 AMD Geode LX-700@0.8W (datasheet) 433 MHz 

  Disk (virtual on Flash) 1,048,576 KB (1 GB)  from terminal df command
  RAM from terminal tp command
    Mem:    237844k total,   226552k used,    11292k free,        0k buffers
  RAM and virtual disk are in file:///home/olpc/alvin/memory
  Camera. speaker, microphone, speaker/microphone jacks
  3 USB ports, SD  memory slot
  • How to get version (build 650, for example mentioned on the browse wiki page
  • Volume control: buttons on keyboard and some activities have a slider.
  • Clipboard is on the left side of the home view. This stores copy (ctrl-c) and cut (ctrl-x).

Terminal Activity

  • How to copy and understand the journal better
  • Man pages are not loaded so I went to http://www.linuxmanpages.com
  • Terminal can access usb drive. It is mounted on /media. df shows the mount.
  • vi
  • su - to become root user.
  • find . -name "*.log" find . -mtime -1 -ls
  • screen capture has not been tested

Write Activity

 - insert image only goes to journal with poor choices
 - search is in edit, it is good but it should behooked upto ctrl-fffff  
 - to work on two files, open in two activities and transfer data using the
   clipboard on the left?  
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/New_Users#Opening_files
   clipboard is not pieces of text but launche the application,
   but ctrl-c and ctrl-v work
 - has spell check, but no auto find; how do you add a word 
   maybe /usr/share/dict/words (no, this is empty)
 - has an auto page break
 - write can save (keep) as html and rtf

Browse Activity

  • FullScren: alt-enter toggles
  • View Source: cyrl-U does a view source for web pages but is really slow

Questions/Problems

  • How do you tell what web site you are on, or going to (no status bar)
  • Adobe Flash install to get, for example, pandora.com, to work
  • Cannot search in browse

Spreadsheet

  • This killer app is not ready yet. It is listd on the download page as in development=
  • Google online spreadsheet can be used

Brainstorming

  • Find python spreadsheet and install it
  • Make your own activity, maybe a unix command (for example, find) but tie it to an actiity
  • Write tetris and install
  • Talk to Ken Gamble about online comunity and physical community.
  • Voice recognition and intruder alert
  • Picture or video processing using the camera (intruder alert)
  • Speech recognition (voice list application)
  • Use a lot of online apps
  • Screen capture: it looks like you get a screen capture called screenshot when you copy something to the clipboard. It is stored in /home/olpc/.sugar/data which you can get to from the journal
  • Install linux and sugar on another PC so we can work with it without the laptop. Emulating_the_XO
  • See what the kids have done so far, for example, Peru.

Exchange data with the outside

 - terminal: USB drive is mounted on /media
 - journal automatically shows the drive at the bottom of the screen:
   - USB files can be opened from the drvie 
   - drag a journal entry to the USB icon to copy to USB.

Keyboard

 - top row: esc  search(journal)  neighborhood friends  home  activity 
 - laptop.org getting started keyboard
 - what are the other panels next to the touch pad
 - what is the hand key next to alt: it is shown on the web getting started,
   as not used yet
 - alt-enter toggles full screen mode which can be used in write, browse
 - fn-erase erases from the right
 - alt-f is the same as frame button on the upper right
   this works in write but not in main view
 - alt-n goes to journal
 - alt tab cycles through the activities
 - alt-p cycles through the activities
 - alt-r rotates the screen
 - can you hang the keyboard mapping or add new key shortcuts?

Problems/Questions

  • Sometimes the touchpad goes haywire; reboot fixes; maybe a memory management problem
  • Wireless does not support wpa encryption. wep works. I used shared key with HEX. I needed a reboot to make it work.
  • How to listen to an mp3 file downloaded from the web

DEMO

The purpose of this demo section is to have a 20 minute show of the most interesting features.

  • Network, Neighborhood, Home, alt-tab
  • Journal: Start Here
    • Search for TurtleArt
    • Launch MovingFlower (a TurtleArt stored in my local journal)
  • browse
    • laptop.org/start for getting started
    • Full screen (alt enter)
    • Flip screen and close, rotate screen

See also

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