Re: How do I project an XO
Kurt Gramlich wrote: * Steve Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] [080516 07:55]: I am doing a talk in front of a large audience and would like to show the XO's screen on a projector. I have a laptop which can be projected and ideally would like to show the XO's screen on the laptop. Other solutions (not a camera on the XO's screen) would be considered. Any suggestions. perhaps our XO-LiveCd helps? http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd Viele Gruesse/Regards Kurt http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd There is a wiki page which lists the alternatives. I have successfully used http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Remote_display#Cloning_a_current_Sugar_session_.28using_VNC.29 with both Linux and Windows running a VNC viewer on the laptop. Note that if you want the VNC viewer mouse and keyboard to work on the XO, you need to do http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Remote_display#Enabling_Keyboard_and_Mouse as well. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] Sugar on the EEE PC
Bernie Innocenti wrote: a serious problem in the most underserved areas --- the price trend is for the second generation of the low cost laptops to head back to $500. The Asus 900 has a suggested list of $550 ? That's weird marketing... ASUS and Intel know they will have to beat OLPC's offer head to head. Not in the adult-use case USA market! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Walter leaving and shift to XP.
Mitch Bradley wrote: But in the steady state, the web is the high-order bit, sufficient to qualify as education in and of itself. Well ... it *was* at one time -- a university library made up of electrons. But in my mind, that was long ago in a galaxy far away. Oh, sure, you can still spend time on the web in the university library. But now there's a red light district, shopping malls, gambling casinos, stalkers, bullying, con games, electronic gangs and thugs. I've got my two G1G1 units and there are presumably two children somewhere who have the two Give One units. Don't get me wrong -- I think the *XO* is a positive force in the world. And I think it's *more* positive than what the WWW has become. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Michael Stone wrote: Friends, At long last, we have a new Update.1 Release Candidate, signed and waiting for your attention at http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/703/jffs2/ Release notes continue to develop at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Update.1_Software_Release_Notes with more technical commentary being stored at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_4 Enjoy, Michael ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel OK ... I installed it on my G1G1 XO (via the GamePad / USB method). It boots up into Sugar, and I can see the frame, but not icons to start up any activities. Is there something I need to do?? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Chris Ball wrote: Hi Ed, OK ... I installed it on my G1G1 XO (via the GamePad / USB method). It boots up into Sugar, and I can see the frame, but not icons to start up any activities. Is there something I need to do?? Yes: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Testing_Update.1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Activity_Pack .. or you can use Bert's script: wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py python update-activities.py - Chris. OK ... got it working now. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: OLPC seeks a CEO -- who was your favorite CEO elsewhere?
John Gilmore wrote: == Who's the best manager or CEO you ever worked for? Hands down, C. Norman (Norm) Winningstad! [snip] OLPC has already changed the world in a small way, by teaching us that there's a vibrant world market for low cost, high function portable computers, and reminding us how much leverage there is in third world educational improvement. OLPC still has a chance to change the world in a big way, by satisfying that market, rather than leaving it to commercial companies to half-assedly pick up the pieces. One *big* challenge OLPC faces is that those commercial companies aren't half-assed at all -- they are *directly* competing with OLPC by all legal means! Steering OLPC back on to the rails before it crashes and burns will be a job your favorite CEO or manager will never forget. I'm not sure your presuppositions are accurate here. First of all, I don't think OLPC is off the rails or headed towards a crash and burn fate. Second, there are very real constraints OLPC has accepted: 1. Non-profit status 2. Open-source licensing 3. Depending on volunteer software engineering. Finally, I don't think your problem is going to be finding *applicants*. Your problem is going to be finding the *right* applicant. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: I/O scheduling (pdflush) on the XO
Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
For the fun of it, started a resource-intensive task (100% CPU,
sporadic floods of disk writes) on my G1G1 XO. Eventually, it
failed with a severe (38) fortran error trying to write its
checkpoint file {mikus note: many quick small write operations}.
Why? This device has a 433 MHz 32-bit processor, 256 MB of RAM and a 1
GB jffs2 flash disk. What do you expect?
That situation may be a pathological one -- but what I found
interesting was that in again doing something similar (different
worktask), 'top' showed 'pdflush' requiring lots of CPU (up to
52%!!). [And 'jffs2_gcd_mtd0' keeps showing up on 'top', too.]
I take it that my XO is *struggling* when presented with heavy
disk I/O.
Again, where's the surprise here? An XO is *not* a scientific
workstation! It's a computer for elementary school students!
If you want to run stuff like this, do it on a school server class
machine and write an XO client.
___
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Re: Setting up Fedora 7 on a ex-Windows machine (Ottawa)
James wrote: Hello OLPC people! I am working on a Snakes and Ladders game for the XO, to help young children learn to count. You can find my first draft of the game here: http://olpc-dev.fuelindustries.com/snakes_080116.zip. I'm looking for help in getting Fedora 7 to run on a Sony Vaio PCG- GRT796HP laptop that used to run Windows. It's a Pentium 4, running at 2.67 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM. I've spent several hours trying various approaches and distributions, without success. This is my first excursion into Linux territory, and I'm still finding my feet with Python. I'm more at ease with development on Macintosh, and have only scraped the surface of using the Terminal. Please don't hesitate to spoonfeed me in all things Linux and Python. What I can do - I'd almost given up hope of getting the Vaio to run Fedora when I tried using the XO LiveCD from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/ livebackupcd. This worked perfectly, which encourages me to believe that the issue is not with the machine but with what I am doing to it. Where I get stuck - I've downloaded the F-7-i386-DVD.iso file from http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents//Fedora-7-i386.torrent , and burnt it to a DVD-ROM. The initial menu screen appears. If I choose the default (graphic) installation, eventually the screen starts to display vibrant pulsing graphics which I do not believe are intended. If I choose the text mode for installation, and step through the various screens, I eventually run into a bug in the installer script. Rodney Smith entered a description of the bug into the RedHat bugbase on 2007-07-08, but there seems to have been no movement on it since then. This leads me to believe that there must be an obvious workaround, so others have just side-stepped the bug and moved on. The original bug report was marked as NEEDINFO, so I supplied that info on 2008-01-21. You can read the complete report here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=247399 What I'm hoping to do - My aim is to install a version of Linux as close to the XO version as possible. This will make it easier for me to get into the correct mindset and best practices for developing for the XO. I'm not married to the idea of getting Fedora 7 to run if the line of least resistance is to install something similar. In his bug report, Rodney Smith notes that System previously had fc5 that was installed using a dvd and the graphical interface without a hitch and that ran fine. I've looked for a downloadable version of Fedora Core 5 or 6 for a x86 machine, but all the links that I have found end up at the Get Fedora page, which now limits itself to downloads of Fedora 7 and 8 http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora . I get a similar bug when I try installing Fedora 8. I've also tried installing Ubuntu 6, but run into the graphic-interface-shows-vibrant- pulsing-graphics issue. If it hadn't been for XO-LiveCD_080130.iso performing perfectly on the machine, I'd have written off my Sony Vaio as being incompatible with Linux. If anyone can help me get some version of Linux installed on the machine, I'd be most grateful. If there are any Python developers on this list in the Ottawa area, I'd be interested to hear from them too. Thanks in advance, James http://nonlinear.openspark.com/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel There are two major Linux community distros now -- Fedora and Ubuntu. You've tried both of them and they've croaked. A couple of things you can try: 1. In general, more *recent* distros have a better shot at finding and dealing with unusual hardware than the older ones. So rather than dropping back to Fedora 5 or 6, you're better off trying to get 8 or pre-release 9 to work. 2. The major distros all have forums where people who are having problems like yours can get help. 3. When you boot a Fedora install DVD, you have an opportunity to do a media check to see if the download and burn was correct. If you didn't do that, do it now, and if you have a bad DVD, you'll need to download again, burn again, and media check again until you have a good one! I think you can do this with Ubuntu as well, but I haven't tried it recently. 4. If the graphic *installer* doesn't work, there is a text-based installer that might work. You'll have to set up your X and desktop later, but it's worth a try if the other things fail. 5. If you can't get Fedora or Ubuntu to work, there are other distros you can try. CentOS 5 and Debian Etch are solid, stable distros. They are probably carrying older packages than what you'd like in the ideal case, but if they work and the newer ones don't, you'll at least be up and running. Another alternative, but not
Re: [OLPC library] MATLAB for OLPC?
Ian Bicking wrote: I'm not sure his summary here is true. You can do efficient operations over sets of data in Python (actually due to some small tweaks to the language requested by NumPy/Numeric users back around the time of Python 2.1). So if you do something like array * 6, it actually does the multiplication of items in the array in C. They bend Python's magic methods quite a bit in NumPy, so things like array access, slicing, and multiplication all avoid actually iterating over the arrays or matrixes in Python. 1. Python's array handling is the subject of an excellent chapter in Beautiful Code. :) 2. I may be wrong, but IIRC NumPy is already installed on the XO by default! I forget what depends on it, but I think it's there as a dependency. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC library] MATLAB for OLPC?
Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero wrote: 2008/1/28 C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Jan 28, 2008 5:24 PM, Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 28, 2008, at 8:04 PM, Cleve Moler wrote: (I doubt that MATLAB runs in the OLPC, but I'm not sure.) There are a number of open-source replacements for MATLAB, including GNU Octave ( http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ ) and Maxima ( http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ ). --scott -- Another interesting open source math project also pointed as a replacement of matlab is Sage * http://www.sagemath.org/** * My turn: 1. Both Maxima/XMaxima/wxMaxima and R run on my XO out of the box courtesy of yum. With the Maximae, you get your choice of Lisp run times. I've successfully used both the clisp and SBCL runtimes. They do have a lot of dependencies, however, so watch your flash space. 2. Maxima is a Computer Algebra System and R is a graphical and statistical/numeric package. Both will do number crunching, but they're two different beasts, and both fundamentally different beasts from Matlab. 3. There are two and a half free Matlab clones. Someone mentioned Octave, but there is also Freemat, and a half-free package called SciLab. I call SciLab half-free because I don't know its exact license. You can download it freely, but I'm not sure all of the GPL freedoms are in place on it. I have used exactly none of these -- I learned R and don't see the need for another number cruncher. 4. On to Sage -- Sage is a wonderful package. It is written in Python and wraps many specialized and more general math packages. Its goal is to replace Mathematica, Maple, and some other less-well-known math packages. However -- it's huge. And it installs everything independently of whether you have the same package already as part of your distro. I loaded it once, but there were only two or three rather specialized packages in Sage that weren't in my Gentoo repositories already. I think it's modular -- you don't have to load the whole enchilada. I might load the base on my virtual XO just to see how much space the core takes, because it's really an excellent collection. If you can only load *one* math package, I highly recommend wxMaxima with the clisp run time. That's going to give you the most bang for your flash space. You don't really need XMaxima -- wxMaxima is a much better UI. By the way, wxMaxima also runs on Windows!! Well ... so does R. In fact, the Windows UI for R is better than the core Linux UI. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC library] OLPC+MATLAB+Greene DNA Chip = Disease Tricorder for developing world
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: R has several server options, although I've never used them. http://www.rforge.net/Rserve/ http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/R.rsp.html and if you absolutely positively *must* use Windows, http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/dcom/RSrv135.html ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Hershey Felder, Zulu Musical Instruments, Essential To Develop Musical Traditions In Africa
william romsay wrote: Hershey Felder, Zulu Musical Instruments, Essential To Develop Musical Traditions In Africa African music is the music of Africans who live in a large region of 50 nations, each with a special culture, history and language, South of Sahara. Zulu musical instruments are part of this multilingual culture. African music has some distinct characteristics: the use of repetition is one of them. Another important characteristic is the polyphony; this is the combination of different musical parts played simultaneously. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel 1. Interesting ... can you post some links? 2. I think it's time the OLPC project had a list specific to audio on the XO and the world music aspects of it. Does someone on the project want to create such a list in the main MailMan area, or should I go ahead and start a Google group on the subject? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO
imm wrote: On 22 Jan 2008, at 3:43, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: By the way -- as far as microtonal and xentonal and world music scales are concerned, MIDI's pitch bends are an awkward hack. Serious *microtonal* algocompsynth practitioners either have to spend time working around MIDI or use something else. My worry is that a lot of the communities these machines will go to, will want to perform microtonal and xentonal music, but are a long way from being algocompsynth practitioners, and the MIDI tweaking involved is, well, lets say non-trivial... I saw Csound (presumably wrapped by TamTam or *something*) as the way to enable that facility transparently. Perhaps I am too optimistic? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel Let's get our own mailing list -- or appoint a curator of world music on the Wiki. I am on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, which has the experts on xen/microtonality, world scales, etc. But as far as I know I'm the only one there with an XO. Let me see if I can get scala (the musical scale analysis program, not the programming language) up and running on my XO. That's pretty much required if you want to deal with world scales. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: MIDI does support non-Western music (was: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO)
Albert Cahalan wrote: imm ian writes: On 22 Jan 2008, at 4:11, Albert Cahalan wrote: You don't need to abuse pitch bends. MIDI lets you redefine the pitches of the notes. You can redefine middle C to be 1234 Hz if you like. Mmm, well, yes, but... No but. You can redefine at will, for individual notes. If you need a player, try timidity. If you have obsolete equipment that can only do pitch bends, you can use Scalia to convert a MIDI file. Scalia can also convert back. It's not so much the pitches that are the issue, it's the intervals, and MIDI kind of constrains what you can do about that, so you do kind of end up abusing pitch bend... Nope. (not that abusing pitch bend is a tragedy though) Since 1996, the MIDI tuning specification has allowed you to set the pitch to within 1/16384 of a semitone. Since 1999, the MIDI tuning extensions have made this a bit more efficient. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel I'm still trying to get scala (not scalia -- he is or was a Supreme Court justice) to run on the XO. It requires some Ada run-time libraries and the GTK Ada bindings. It requires gtkada 2.8. Is that compatible with what's on the XO? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO
Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote: [snip] I gave up on OSS years ago, when I discovered that there were dozens of high-quality sound cards without free OSS drivers! Alsa was release 1 back then, and there was very little documentation. That's been fixed, and I am not going back to OSS! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO
Albert Cahalan wrote: On Jan 21, 2008 12:27 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (b) as has been pointed out repeatedly, CSound is an open standard (which incidentally predates the MIDI standard). It may be open, but it isn't much of a standard. I've only found one implementation, csound itself. There are no hardware implementations. Pushing this kind of thing is **wrong**. (c) Victor gave some very compelling reasons as to why CSound is a better choice, especially for a program that is reaching out to non-Western musical sensibilities. MIDI does non-Western stuff, including unusual tuning systems. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel Well ... I can't speak for the children of the developing world, nor do I have much experience with Tam Tam as wrapped around CSound. But as someone who has devoted a fair amount of his spare time over the past few decades in pursuit of algorithmic composition and synthesis (henceforth abbreviated algocompsynth) of music, I think I'm qualified to lay down some opinions here. 1. MIDI is limited but more or less universally spoken. Serious algocompsynth *must* involve support of MIDI. CSound recognized this years ago. 2. There have been numerous attempts to improve on CSound, but nothing else has come forth that's as comprehensive. The orchestras read like assembler code and the scores like a 1960s FORTRAN input card deck, but just about every working algocompsynth practitioner has it and knows it. So, serious algocompsynth *must* involve support of CSound. 3. There are a number of specialized Linux distros for audio. The three that I know the most about are Studio64, Jack Audio Distribution (JAD) and dyne:bolic. Almost all of them have a patched low-latency kernel, and all of them use something called the Jack Audio Connection Kit. They may still have to support both OSS and ALSA, but as I noted in another post, ALSA had support years ago for sound cards that weren't supported by free-as-in-freedom OSS drivers. So, serious algocompsynth on Linux *must* have a low-latency patched kernel, ALSA, and the Jack Audio Connection Kit. 4. Finally, there are three languages now in common use in algocompsynth. In historical order, they are Lisp/Scheme, Java and Python. Forth was prominent at one time as well, but the major Forth algocompsynth codes have mostly been ported to one of the other languages. So, serious algocompsynth *must* provide Python, Lisp/Scheme and Java support. So the question in my mind is, Should the XO be a platform for serious algocompsynth, or should it be what the project says it is -- an educational project for children to explore and discover? Do children need MIDI, CSound, low-latency kernels, Jack, Lisp and Java? I don't really think so. The fact that Tam Tam has CSound and Python under the hood is only a convenience for the implementers. There are many fewer wheels that need to be re-invented as a result. By the way, one other note here. A number of the more advanced synthesis algorithms edge upon some rather well-defended patents by Yamaha and others. It's a similar issue to those around media codecs -- even though technically such things are software or formulas that can't be patented, once they get embodied in pieces of gear that you can buy in a music store, things change. By the way -- as far as microtonal and xentonal and world music scales are concerned, MIDI's pitch bends are an awkward hack. Serious *microtonal* algocompsynth practitioners either have to spend time working around MIDI or use something else. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO
Albert Cahalan wrote: On Jan 19, 2008 4:33 PM, victor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can't speak for TamTam because I am not involved in their design details, but I can say this, Csound's standard score preceeds MIDI by at least a decade (or two if you consider where it came from). It is much more flexible to convey musical data than MIDI. There are MIDI to csound score converters, but that is beside the point, because Csound can play MIDI files directly, receive realtime MIDI data and even output it. There is no problem whatsoever, with the proper instruments, Csound will be a MIDI synthesizer like any other. The main thing is, that it is not limited to it (thank goodness...). How about showing some support for standards by dropping the non-standard stuff? You can #ifdef it. Maybe you can even save a few bytes. If you really must, you can embed the non-standard stuff into a MIDI file. It's better to avoid non-standard stuff entirely of course, and any extended MIDI file had better play decently on a standard MIDI player. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel One of the main reasons I got an XO was because it has CSound. It's a ghastly API, but it's been around for years and there are thousands of working instruments! There's a huge book on it, and I doubt very seriously if anyone will ever come up with a digital sound analysis and synthesis tool set as comprehensive without investing a lot of effort re-inventing a bunch of wheels, levers, inclined planes and such. By the way -- I've been meaning to check to see if this is in Trac, but the csound-manual and csound-tutorial RPMs in the repository appear to be empty. I can install them, but there isn't anything on the machine after I do. I'm also attempting to get some of the Planet CCRMA software loaded on the system. At this point, all I really want is Common Music -- I don't need another synthesizer since I have CSound, and I don't need a music notation program. If anyone else has already done this, I'd love to hear about it. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: disabling root and olpc passwords
Mikus Grinbergs wrote: The 2008-1-12 OLPC News says ... so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. The way I have my G1G1 system set up (I have no wireless) I *need* to ftp in. For that, I have set a password for olpc. It would be ok with me to set up a different user+password for ftp, but would *not* be ok for password support to be disabled. Also, I don't believe in the political correctness of not using root. I do need to install/remove/change things as root, and *strongly* prefer not to use 'sudo' for that -- I log in as root, and am willing to take the risk of committing a disastrous mistake. Here, too, having a password seems natural to me. I agree with the aim of making the OLPC simple to use, but please don't take passwords away entirely. mikus p.s. I presume the existing 'passwd' command was taken from Fedora. It is too paranoid, forbidding too_short passwords, too_homogeneous passwords, too_similar passwords, etc., etc., etc. Such rules may be needed for a datacenter - but for a schoolroom? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel Typical Linux practice is the following: 1. One *never* allows remote shell login as root -- *ever* -- even behind a firewall. One allows only *one* user in the wheel group to log in to a shell account, and then *only* via ssh. 2. When root access is needed, sudo is used, with the least permissive mode possible. 3. ftp is done using sftp and/or scp. For Windows clients, there's PuTTY. Anything less than this level of security is a bad habit -- a *very* bad habit. Please don't encourage such habits, or ask the open source community to cater to them. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The other option is to write implementations of the codecs that avoid the patents. Whether that is possible depends on the exact wording of the patent, and sometimes it takes a few weeks working with a good patent attorney to work out exactly what the patent really says. Sometimes it just isn't possible. We really need a open project to do patent analysis of this kind and determine which of these key patents (not just codecs, but also other important blocking patents) can be avoided, and which ones are too tied to the format to avoid. Perhaps the OLPC project would provide a good bit of motivation for people to do this type of work? 1. There are two kinds of good patent attorneys. One kind works pro bono for free software and the other gets paid big bucks by patent holders. It's not just a question of quality or attorney or length of time spent. It's a question of two competing sides of a specific and very detailed technical and legal argument being thrashed out in the press and in the courts. If you head to the Groklaw web site, you can see this sort of thing (from the free software side). This process does not take a few weeks but *decades*. 2. I personally don't think the OLPC project has the bandwidth or the energy to get involved in such a struggle. As the recent events between OLPC and Intel have showed, when you wrestle with a pig, both of you get mud all over but only the pig enjoys it. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: A jabber hosting offer...
Dave Belfer-Shevett wrote: I've just received my, er, my son's XO, and he's ecstatic with it, enjoying fiddling with Python programs and other tidbits. I've heard that the Jabber 'chat' functions are disabled on the US XO's, mostly because the existing jabber hosts can't really take the load of all these machines going out. I have machinery and bandwidth available for setting up a dedicated, fairly powerful machine specifically to run Jabber for the OLPC community. I have no problems building, configuring, installing, and maintaining the machine in a colo facility in Bedford, MA. I'll donate the hardware and time to make it work, if it'll benefit the project. I'm looking at a dual-Xeon 2.8 gig Ubuntu Gutsy box (1U) with a pair of mirrored drives. The facility has multiple peered connections (it supports a series of VOIP servers), and is well managed. I have experience running jabber servers, and sysadminning. Would this be of benefit to the community? Please let me know. I can be reached on jabber at [EMAIL PROTECTED] , or email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] is fine too. I'm also (obviously) on the devel list :) Thanks. I do want to contribute to the project in any way I can... -dbs ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel Some other people have suggested local Jabber servers, and I agree with them. What I think would be really wonderful would be if someone could make a LiveCD that would boot up as a Jabber server for XOs! It's a real bear to configure one, and a LiveCD would make it feasible for communities to do it. I've been on the xochat.com server from time to time, and there are sometimes so many people you can't really meet anyone. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO as a scientific platform: wiki page
David W Hogg wrote: FWIW, I started a wiki page (on my research group wiki) about setting up my G1G1 XO for scientific writing on the road (and, eventually, research, but right now my job is to write a grant proposal on the XO as I travel around this weekend). http://howdy.physics.nyu.edu/index.php/Setting_up_an_XO Sorry for the spam. Hogg Yeah ... I'm going in similar directions. A couple of other notes: 1. Both LyX and TeXmacs are in the repositories, and I've installed both successfully. I forget what the dependencies are, etc. I prefer LyX for ease of use, but TeXmacs will allow you to insert sessions from many other packages painlessly. 2. If you do number crunching, the XO comes with a fair amount of (Python) numerical software. It also has the Atlas linear algebra libraries, although the ones loaded on the box are only tuned to i386 level. More highly optimized versions are available via yum. 3. wxMaxima costs about 28 MB IIRC, if you install the clisp run time, and you get clisp as part of the bargain. The default Maxima uses gcl and is about the same size. The SBCL version is also available, but it's much larger. If you have TeXmacs and wxMaxima, you can get a Maxima session directly into a document. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: shutting off wireless for air travel
Mitch Bradley wrote: This is all documented on the wiki. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Airplane_mode and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ#How_do_I_disable_wireless_when_flying.3F If you don't want the wireless to restart automatically after a reboot, renaming /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin works. Yeah ... when you take off, your XO is powered off and stowed. Then when they allow you to operate it, you'll boot it up and the wireless will come on until you can get to a terminal and type the sugar-control-panel command. So ... I think this hack is necessary if you're going to operate the XO in flight. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Kernel configuration options
John Richard Moser wrote: I'm also noticing some things like KALLSYMS and BUG(), BSD process accounting, and the like. KALLSYMS, BUG(), and printk() are useful; on a true embedded device I'd say remove 'em but I can't justify it here... BSD process accounting and auditd support though? Yeah ... I run stuff like that in *my* kernels, but I'm a kernel geek. Does that stuff need to be in a machine in a village school in Rwanda? P.S.: I do know a Red Hat geek in Nigeria. :) In the same line, a lot of debugging options are in use. I'm using Build 653, I guess it may be a developer's build and thus there's a lot of debugging stuff; but in the final should things like CONFIG_PROFILING , CONFIG_KPROBES, CONFIG_DEBUG_FS, CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS, CONFIG_SCHEDSTATS, CONFIG_TIMER_STATS, CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT, CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK ... be removed? I think I agree with you here with the possible exception of CONFIG_PROFILING aka oprofile support. Finally, I'm noticing a lot of stuff can be built as modules, but is built in. Networking in its entirety; sound drivers; mouse; and USB (the mouse looks like it's PS2) can be loaded by HAL and UDEV, but this will increase boot time (then again, HAL apparently needs to be fixed anyway[2], so this could be encouraging?). More interesting to me however is that EXT2, EXT3, Joliet, ZISOFS, RAMFS, NFS, and possibly PROMFS because I don't think JFFS2 depends on it BUT I'm not sure if it's used at some point before it can be loaded as a module. I'd keep as much as possible that's XO-specific and *always* going to be loaded built in. You're always going to need sound, mouse and keyboard, wireless and video, and I'd keep the core USB stuff built in as well, since that's really the only way to talk to the machine besides wireless. But the rest of it should be built as modules. The filesystems should be there (as modules). The XO is going to be talking to school servers, and there's no point in ruling out NFS, Samba, plugging in an external USB DVD reader/writer, etc. Again, the question is, would a village in Rwanda format a USB stick ext3? :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Kernel configuration options
Mitch Bradley wrote: From a security standpoint, there is an advantage to building in everything. The main kernel is verified with a crypto signature before it is executed. Loading a module without first verifying a similarly-strong signature weakens the security. Modules are a good idea for kernels that are intended to run on a wide variety of hardware. I am in favor of treating XO like an appliance and making the kernel as monolithic as possible. I'm not familiar with the security stuff in general or this case in particular. But I think the trend in the Linux community has been towards more flexibility, moving stuff from kernel space to user space, etc. Then again, since the *hardware* is soldered onto the mainboard and can't be easily expanded, why shouldn't the *kernel* be just as inflexible? ;) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Updates API documentation for everything.
Edward Cherlin wrote: Does anybody know of a documentation tool for Open Firmware, or for FORTH more generally? Exploring using 'words' and 'see' Are you looking for automated documentation generation, or FORTH coding and documentation standards? I don't know about the former, but there is a well-established set of the latter, and given adherence, I'm sure the former is eminently possible. The FORTH community is fairly small (relative to, say, Python), and as a result, most FORTH programmers don't have much trouble reading the code of other FORTH programmers. But I don't know about outsiders coming to FORTH from more traditional languages. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Uniting the community's infrastructure
Chris Hager wrote: Hi all! From now on, the channel #olpc-groups is open with the ambition to connect local communities from everywhere! I can imagine a lot of potential for collaborations, projects, problem solving and not-reinventing-the-wheel :) ! SJ and I have talked about the current status of the irc-infrastructure for the communities, and had some ideas for the future. Basically, 1. many of the local channels are inactive 2. we have had no channel to cross-connect communities 3. the channel #olpc-europe developed from the ccc 4. the whole olpc project is gaining momentum = 5. the logical next step would be a united communities-channel to focus our common effort! We could basically connect via #olpc-groups on a global basis, and use #olpc-europe/asia/africa/... for regional discussions. The same idea could apply to some of the mailing-lists. We can basically use the grassroots list (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots)! Please post feedback to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I wish you all an interesting and successful year 2008! - chris (olpc austria) Well, like a lot of the Internet and life in general, things tend to self-organize. I've started a Google group for Portland Oregon XO owners, and I'm personally on quite a few of the other mailing lists. In any event, I'm not sure it's time yet for any consolidation, either on mailing lists/Google Groups or in IRC. I think the best we should hope for at this point is to ask everyone on IRC to use the characters olpc in naming channels. That way, the IRC client channel listers can find them. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
I got a developer key -- now what? :)
I signed up for a developer key, so I have one now. But what can I do with it? How can I be sure I'm not going to nuke the XO beyond all recovery? Is there some kind of documentation on what's risky and what's safe? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: I got a developer key -- now what? :)
Chris Ball wrote: Hi, I signed up for a developer key, so I have one now. But what can I do with it? You can do anything that you'd expect to do with a standard laptop; install any operating system, and flash a new BIOS. How can I be sure I'm not going to nuke the XO beyond all recovery? Is there some kind of documentation on what's risky and what's safe? You're safe no matter what you do to the NAND, because the firmware can flash a new NAND image from USB. If you want to be sure of not bricking it, you should avoid flashing firmware that isn't signed by OLPC. - Chris. Ah ... OK. I have the procedure for flashing the NAND, but I haven't seen one for flashing the firmware. Is that documented somewhere? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 3rd Fedora disk curdle
Gerard J. Cerchio wrote: In the short time I have been working with olpc I have had my Fedora VMware machines curdle their ext3 disks 3 times. I have been running 2.4 and 2.6 Redhats and Debians for over a year with no such problems. Once the first Fedora 7 machine broke its disk I have been very careful to shutdown every time. I cannot point to any particular activity that has corrupted the disk image. Things will start to go wrong and a subsequent reboot with fschk will yield a disk hopelessly in trouble. Does the jhbuild emulator do any exotic direct to disk IO that may be causing this? Does Fedora aggressively modify its ext3, vfs or SCSI drivers? I have built a third Fedora 8 VM this time using IDE disk IO in hopes that this problem will go away. Has anyone else seen this kind of problem? 1. Define curdle their ext3 disk. 2. What version of VMware are you using? 3. What's your host version? 4. Are you using the default settings on your virtual disks or are you changing them in some way? My answers to 2 - 4: 2. VMware Workstation 6 3. Gentoo Linux on an AMD64 (Athlon64 X2 dual-core with 4 GB of RAM) 4. No ... I turn off the snapshots and make my virtual disks independent and persistent, and I turn on write caching. I have built virtual XOs, virtual Fedora 7 and 8 systems (32-bit!!), and jhbuild inside a virtual Fedora 8 system, all without any data corruption. The XOs I build with IDE drives because they won't boot from a SCSI drive -- hda is hard-wired somewhere that I don't recall off the top of my head -- but all the others use SCSI drives with no problem. So the first thing I recommend is to check your hard disk settings in VMware. The defaults *should* work without incident, but the snapshot logic may be doing something to you. -Gerard ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 3rd Fedora disk curdle
Gerard J. Cerchio wrote: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: 1. Define curdle their ext3 disk. I use the word curdle to describe a disk with lost inodes, sectors that are multiply allocated, and other such problems that fsck valiantly tries to correct but winds up with a non-working system. In the last case I got a clean boot and clean subsequent fsck, however many applications just seg faulted when I tried to run them. 2. What version of VMware are you using? VMWare server 1.04 (latest freebe) 3. What's your host version? Windows XP 64 SP2. Booting off an Nvidia RAID5 4 disk 1 TB. 4. Are you using the default settings on your virtual disks or are you changing them in some way? The first two I just took all the defaults. This new one I put on the IDE controller. I don't have a whole bunch of faith in the snapshot system either so I just don't use it. Now here is something interesting, I just did a NTFS chkdsk on the RAID and it moved my vmdk's into a copy of the the VM's directory while reporting 2 lost files. These are the first errors I have ever seen on the NVidia RAID after running it for a year. This has me nervous enough to move the VM's off the RAID and onto an IDE backup drive in the system. Maybe I am looking at some VMare/XP64 interaction. Anyway I'll report any new problems on this thread. Yeah, VMware can't deal very well with host-side platform problems. :) How sure are you that VMware Server 1.04 works on Windows XP 64 SP2? I'm running VMware Workstation *6* on my AMD64 box -- I haven't messed with the free server in a while and I've never tried it on a 64-bit machine. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Error: Missing Dependency: libpoppler-glib.so.1 is needed by package evince-olpc
Jim Oser wrote: I am trying to make a developer system with the source code. I downloaded and installed ship2-olpc-653.vmdk and ship2-olpc-653.vmx This is working fine in my VMWare Fusion setup. Where are the prebuilt vmdk and vmx on the Internet? I've been downloading the .img files and making my own with qemu and VMware Workstation! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
A couple of adult use case questions
1. My typical use of laptops is nearly always with the AC adapter plugged in. I don't travel a lot, and when I do, I generally don't operate the laptop in an aircraft. I've been told that this is harder on batteries than allowing them to discharge and recharge. With the XO, though, I'm planning to use it more like a laptop -- only connect to AC when required. Is that easier on the battery, harder on the battery, or about the same as what I've done with my older laptops? 2. My experience with wireless in hotels and Linux is that: a. You usually need Windows and IE to authenticate the first time. This isn't a problem because my other laptops have been dual-booted, but the XO isn't and won't be. b. I've had a number of instances where something in the way the Linux wireless configuration (it's a DHCP thing) can actually crash the hotel's wireless infrastructure and require a reboot of it! This has happened to me (and possibly other hotel guests at the same time) at least three times. I don't know enough about the details to know exactly what the mechanism is, but again, since I wouldn't have Windows, I wouldn't be able to follow the support tech's instructions if I crashed it. Of course, this use case is 180 degrees away from the reason the machine was designed. But still, if I do go on the road, say, to a G1G1 conference somewhere, are things like this going to be a problem? Conversely, if there *are* going to be G1G1 conferences, might I suggest that they be held on a university campus rather than in a hotel? :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Playing with IDEs
Bernardo Innocenti wrote: Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: Think VERY carefully about his. Your opening up a world of potential hurt for 2D game developers and similar kinds of apps. I designed a few 2D arcade games myself and I've found that it only takes a minimal amount of thought to make them properly scale within a reasonable range or resolutions. PC games had the requirement of supporting multiple resolutions since the MS-DOS era. Today Cairo makes it super easy. And even if a very peculiar 2D bitmap game couldn't be made to scale easily, this is not a good excuse for all the rest of the activities to lazily hardcode screen coordinates and font sizes instead of computing them based on their window size. Well ... let me put on my marketing hat for a bit here: The current XO is designed to have a life of five years. Now if it only takes a bright child a year or two to outgrow the *hardware* of the XO, that means that the current XO will probably get handed down to a younger child and *someone, not necessarily OLPC*, will have an opportunity to produce a more advanced hardware platform for graduates of the XO. So I'm with Bernardo on this one -- unless OLPC is willing to rule out being the provider of the XO Plus for older children, activity developers should do nothing that rules out portability, growth paths, agility, or use cases only a little bit removed from the original use cases around which the XO was designed. What I do think is a good idea is to specify a *minimum* screen size which activities must support. I'd guess 1024x768 is a fair choice at this point in time -- I don't see any reason why activity developers should be forced to run on 800x600. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Give One Get One laptop for software development
Danilo Câmara wrote: I'm a student at State University of Campinas, Brazil. I'm researching efficient implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in constrained environments. I'm working with an ARM XScale PXA270 platform but would like also to work with a x86-based constrained platform. I think the OLPC laptop is an interesting option for many reasons. I'd like to know if one of those laptops of the Give One Get One program are suitable for software development? I guess so, but would like to be sure. How are you going to get an XO? The Give One Get One program is only in the USA and Canada, and the other units go to young children. Assuming that you can obtain one, there are two ways to develop for the XO: 1. Cross-develop on a more powerful platform, download the software to the XO, and test it. 2. Native develop and test on the XO itself. The XO as currently shipping does *not* contain a development tool set other than Python and Etoys, which is a version of Squeak, which is a Smalltalk IDE. In particular, there is no Perl interpreter on the XO, and there is not GCC or any of the conventional Linux development tool set. On top of that, there is very little room on the XO's base flash hard drive (1 GB) for any additional software at the system level. As a consequence, I think you'd want to either cross-develop using the standard GNU/Linux tools, or use a more compact development tool set on the XO itself. I recommend Forth for the compact development tool set on the XO itself. The stock Fedora gforth package should work, although I've only tested it on an emulated XO -- my physical unit has not arrived yet. And there is a version of Forth that is more or less XO-native -- it's a port of the boot firmware to run in the Linux environment. Do I need any special hardware or cable to connect to the OLPC laptop from my desktop? A telnet or SSH connection is all I need. Yes ... once you set the root and olpc passwords on the unit itself, you can ssh in over either the wireless network or via a USB standard Ethernet connection. I don't believe the telnet server is there -- nobody I know uses telnet any more because it's insecure. I want real timings, so I think an emulated solution would not be suitable. Well ... I guess that depends on how good your emulator is. But the Geode is more like an Athlon than anything else -- I think it has MMX and 3DNOW! but not SSE or 3DNOWEXT or any later SSE instruction sets. That's one of the reasons I think you might want to look at Forth -- it's a complete IDE, it has an assembler built in, and it's pretty easy to profile Forth code at the chip level. That's tough to do in C because of the edit-compile-link-run cycle. BTW, gForth works just fine on the XScale. :) Oh, yeah -- one other question -- how are you doing elliptic curve crypto on the XSCale? Isn't it floating-point intensive? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Give One Get One laptop for software development
Rob Savoye wrote: 2. Native develop and test on the XO itself. GCC and G++ are both used with the XO. Used with an XO, sure. But not *installed on* the XO by default. I run virtual XOs in VMware Workstation 6. You can't install VMware Tools on one because: a. There isn't enough room for the RPM on the base 1 GB hard drive. b. If you build a virtual XO with a larger hard drive, you can install the RPM, but the configure script doesn't work. It needs Perl, which isn't installed. If you install Perl, you find out that it also needs gcc and make, and if you install those, you find out that the kernel headers or some other kernel package doesn't match the running kernel. I believe the geode optimized GCC and Glibc are included now. If not, here's instructions on building your own: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Building_OLPC_Tools I may check these out -- my base distro is Gentoo, so I may just skip all this. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Playing with IDEs
Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: Figured it was time for a new thread for this Idle is actually included on the olpc in /usr/lib/python2.5/idlelib However trying to invoke idle.py gives this error... ** IDLE can't import Tkinter. Your python may not be configured for Tk. Question for those more familiar with python on linux, Is there something I can yum or otherwise download and install that would fix this? JK I think the Tkinter RPM isn't loaded by default ... I think yum install tkinter will bring it in. If I knew how to do anything in Idle, I'd try it on my emulated XO. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fooling with Java
Bert Freudenberg wrote: On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:04 , Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: Okay, I have a JDK installed and it seems to work. For grins i put netbeans on my USB stick and fired it up. It seems to be working however I get no main display. I do get pop up dialogs though. My suspicion is that Netbeans is asking the X wm for a Window and, sicne from what I cna see the window manager in the OLPC is windowless (one fullscreen root window only) it ends u pwitha null window and all the drawing goes down the bit bucket. Has anyone else played with this? If so does anyone know any magic to get it to use the root window for the app frame? Our window manager is Matchbox, it is not window-less but full- screen, that is, it resizes each top-level window to cover the whole screen. In theory this should work fine with all well-behaved X11 apps, and in practice it seems to work for most. Can't help with Java specifically. I brought up a couple of X apps from the terminal window on my virtual XO. Alt-Tab cycles through the windows, including the Journal. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Our Stories: Commercialization?
Tom Boonsiri wrote: After reading the Bender update, I checked out Anna's recent effort (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Anna_B) which seemed to be similar to Ian Daniher's Telehealth module effort and I noticed the following goal. -Van on commercializing Our Stories: would consumers pay for something like a virtual safari tour? A micro-franchise idea Are we actually avoiding the commercialization of the technologies we develop under OLPC? Well ... 1. A recent news item stated that some countries that are heavily into hosting on line gambling casinos are asking the World Trade Organization to fine the USA because we have legislation to protect our citizens from on line gambling casinos. 2. Any talk of commercialization of anything needs to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by dozens of accountants and attorneys here is the USA. In short, there are always going to be grinches trying to steal our Christmases. :) But I'm personally a lot more interested in the stories of the children than I am in a virtual safari. And yes, I'd pay money for the literature, art and music that comes out of the project. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Mounting a USB drive (windows format)
Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: No... reformatting to Fat32 didnt help :( On Dec 21, 2007 1:49 PM, Jeffrey Kesselman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hmm. It is a FAT file system. But it isn't automounting :( And I can't figure out what it name would be to manually mount it... Maybe its the weird U3 Cruiser software. I'll get a second drive, they're cheap now, and reformat it and see if that helps. JK On Dec 21, 2007 1:39 PM, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What kind of windows format do you mean? In my experience HAL automatically mounts FAT and FAT32 USB keys and probably big drives as well. If your drive is formatted NTFS that may be the problem, as I do not reckon the XO to ship with the NTFS write-mode driver. -Ivo -- ~~ Microsoft help desk says: reply hazy, ask again later. ~~ It's very rare to find a USB stick formatted with anything other than FAT32, although it does happen. I've also had Windows refuse to read USB sticks formatted FAT32 by a Linux machine. The other way almost always works -- format it FAT32 on a Windows machine and you'll be able to use it anywhere. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Mounting a USB drive (windows format)
Jeffrey Kesselman wrote:
Hi Guys,
im trying to get started developign but ist pretty clear that my
development environment wont fit on the emulation image's disk.
No biggie, I figured, I'll put it on a USB memory stick.
I can tell my emulator (VMWARE) to make the USb memory stick acessible
to the emulated hardware no problem but I can't figure out how to get
it to mount in the OLPC.
Help? I'm running ship2, if thats any help.
JK
I've been doing a lot of VMware emulations of various OLPC images on my
Linux box. I have an AMD64 running Gentoo Linux and VMware Workstation
6. This could probably be made to work on Windows but I don't have any
largish Windows systems.
1. Download the image ext3 file. I have a wget script that does it.
2. You need to install qemu. It has a utility to convert a .img to a
.vmdk. Here's the bash script that does it, assuming qemu is installed.
#! /bin/bash -v
export
WHERE=http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/ship.2/build653/devel
_ext3
export WHAT=olpc-redhat-stream-ship.2-devel_ext3
wget ${WHERE}/${WHAT}.img.bz2
wget ${WHERE}/${WHAT}.img.bz2.md5
md5sum -c ${WHAT}.img.bz2.md5
bunzip2 ${WHAT}.img.bz2
qemu-img convert ${WHAT}.img -O vmdk ${WHAT}.vmdk
3. OK ... now you have a vmdk image. Rather than mess with a USB stick
or anything like that, I just make a bigger virtual disk and copy the
image over to it! Here's what you have to do:
a. Create a virtual machine. Give it 256 MB and a new virtual disk. The
new virtual disk has to be an IDE and *not* the default SCSI. The
drivers are looking for an IDE drive. Then, *add* a hard drive and
select use existing virtual disk. *That* one is the image you
downloaded and converted to vmdk format.
b. Edit the .vmx file from the virtual machine and add the following
line at the bottom:
bios.forceSetupOnce = TRUE
This will make the machine come up in the emulated BIOS the first time
you boot it. Go over to the boot order selection menu and make sure the
CD-ROM boots before the hard drive.
c. Why do we want to boot from the CD-ROM? Because we have downloaded a
Fedora 8 rescue CD image and we are going to boot *that* to do the copy!
So ... you've got your Fedora image .iso file ... tell VMware to use
that for the CD-ROM and boot the virtual machine.
d. It will come up in the menu ... go to the default rescue option. It
will ask you for a keyboard and language. It will ask you if you want to
configure the network. Say no. It will ask you if you want to rescue
an image. You want to go to the Skip option.
e. Now you're root in a RAM disk. The first thing you need to do is
format the new hard drive. I usually do it manually with fdisk, but
parted is also on the Fedora rescue CD if you want to use that. You
want a single primary partition, partition 1, spanning the entire disk.
The disk will be called /dev/sda.
f. Now execute the following commands:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
e2label /dev/sda1 OLPCRoot
mkdir /orig
mkdir /copy
mount /dev/sdb1 /orig
mount /dev/sda1 /copy
cp -a /orig/* /copy/
g. One last step and you've got it. Type grub at the shell prompt.
You'll get a grub prompt. Type root (hd0,0). It should find an
ext2 filesystem. Then type setup (hd0). That puts the boot loader
into the boot sector.
h. Reboot. The system will come back up in the rescue CD, but you've got
about 60 second before it will do anything. Power down the virtual
machine. Go into the settings and remove the second hard drive (the
original image). Disconnect the .iso of the Fedora rescue CD. Close
the virtual machine. Make a zip archive of the whole virtual machine
directory if you want to.
Now you have a virtual XO with a larger hard drive. I usually make them
2 GB, but I've made some as large as the default, 8 GB.
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Re: Mounting a USB drive (windows format)
Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: On Dec 21, 2007 2:36 PM, Greg KH [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 02:05:29PM -0500, Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: More Diagnosis: I bought an OLPC in the buy one/give one so i just tried the USB stick on the real machine and it works fine. So it just my emulated image that is refusing to mount it for some reason :( I'd really like to keep using VMWare. On my machine its both more convenient and much faster then qemu even with the kqemu wedge. (its a 64 bit dual core, but you can't run qemu in 64 bit mode with kqemu ) Has anyoen else gotten emulation under vmware recognizing USB memory stick drives? You need to tell vmware to do this and take away the device from the underlying operating system that vmware is running on. See the vmware documentation for how to do this properly, it's not an OLPC image issue, but rather a vmware one. I've already done that Greg. (You do that with the VM-removable Devices menu. I'm somewhat of an old hand at VMWare.) The VM has the USB as a device, but the OLPC emulation is not mounting it. So it was a good guess but thats not the problem. It deosnt seem to be mounting the CD-Rom either, which suggests to me that it could be an issue with the automounter configuration in the ship2 build. Is that what everyone else is usign for development? I assume that matches whats actually on my OLPC? Hmmm ... looks like the two of us have been going down similar paths. How many other folks are out there who are building VMware XO emulations as development systems? Speaking of which, given the hacks I previously posted to get a large base hard drive, you can *install* VMware Tools, but you can't configure them. That requires perl, gcc, make and correct kernel headers and kernel build tools. I'm not sure what other dependencies there are -- I haven't crossed the kernel build barrier yet. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Oprofile, swap
John Richard Moser wrote: I just got my OX laptop (hopefully some kid gets the other one soon... or not), and noticed it's slow and kind of buggy. I think I'll get a $25 4GB SD card for a SWAP area... I should run oprofile too, and have it write to the SD card. I understand what an interpreted language like Python does to the CPU but it shouldn't be this bad... it's only going to be like 100 times slower? An actual interpreter will... - Put pressure on the data cache as its code grows - ... but keep the actual interpreter (code) in cache better - Use a relatively large chunk of data for a look-up table - ... or use some convoluted and hard to maintain code - ... or optimally, a look-up table to start the decoding process, if like a CPU bytecode interpreter (Java, CIL) it has an insn + address mode + data (not QUITE optimal for Python, but maybe since simple addition and call happens) - Wind up doing what can easily become a multi-hundred-cycle decoding process for each executed bytecode insn Python rewrites to bytecode (good, interpreting text is slow! Multiple parsing!) but a lot of the main function calls in the API should be C, not Python (taking some of the pressure off). This means Python should be doing a lot of logic in native space, rather than interpreting a lot (unlike Java, which had its whole library written in Java...) I suggest taking a look at PyPy for Python, which will dynamic recompile Python to native code and likely give some good performance benefits. I really can't stand JIT compilation and would prefer something that takes advantage of Mono's own facilities, to centralize the effort in the JIT at least (Mono has nice stuff), but IronPython is Microsoft Permissive License which is not OSI approved. As for real solutions, I want to profile things and see where they're hanging. I may need a Python profiler too, to get a look inside the Python code and see if some functions there are also bad; oprofile will tell me if Python itself is spending an ungodly amount of time in its decoder functions but that's it. I don't have my physical unit yet, but I too am interested in profiling and performance tuning. Unfortunately I have no Python tuning experience so I can't be of much help at the moment. I do have a virtual ship2, running on a 2.2 GHz Athlon64 X2, but that of course is cheating. :) Oprofile is a bit tough to work with -- it makes you install a whole bunch of GUI libraries just to get at the low-level profiling stuff. And the kernel needs to be rebuilt with the right options -- I don't know if the OLPC kernel does so. So for now, I think you'll probably be better off with lower-level command-line tools. I know top is there, but as far as I'm concerned the one must-have package is sysstat. sysstat is a work of pure genius -- it started out as a Linux re-implementation of sar and iostat, but it is much more than that now. Once I get my physical unit, I'll be looking at things in some detail. I'm guessing that adding swap isn't going to help you. If you're memory bound, the solution is to stop activities that you aren't using, not forcing the kernel to move stuff in and out of RAM. top will tell you. Open a terminal window and type top. At the top of the display you'll see memory used, free, cached, etc. There's a keystroke that will sort processes by their resident set size. Type h to get a help menu. If I get a chance tonight, I'll fire up a bunch of activities in my virtual XO and see what it does when it runs out of RAM. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Oprofile, swap
John Richard Moser wrote: (Note: most of this message isn't very useful probably; it's about theoretical software architecture, that nobody's going to implement, that I can't prove, that I'm not really 100% sure about. Still, if you WANT to read it, hey... remember, bad ideas sometimes get corrected by people who are smart enough to turn them into GOOD ideas) Ivan Krstić wrote: On Dec 18, 2007, at 12:27 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: Has anyone looked at Psyco on the XO? Psyco improves performance at the cost of memory. On a memory-constrained machine, it's a tradeoff that can only be made in laser-focused, specific cases. We have not done the work -- partly for It would be wise to throw out the idea of laser-focusing which engine to use. Think of memory costs for running multiple versions of Python. Then again, what IS wise? Any such system needs to efficiently use memory. I like the idea of one based on Mono since it has that whole compacting garbage collector, which (although being a cache destroyer by nature) at least shrinks down memory usage. Of course then you still have Mono on top of it, and CIL code that's been generated, and reflected, and JIT'd, which means you (again) have 2 interpreters in memory (one in CIL, one being Mono itself), and one gets dynamic recompiled (the Python one in CIL), and all the intermediary (CIL) code gets kept for later profiling and optimization... ... didn't I say before I hate the concept of JIT dynamic compilation? Interpreters just suck by nature due to dcache problems (code becomes data, effectively your instruction working set is fixed, the load doesn't go onto icache and dcache both as the program gets bigger...) and due to the fact that you have to do a LOT of work to decode an insn in software (THINK ABOUT QEMU). Interpreters for specific script languages like Python and Perl have the advantage of not having to be a general CPU emulator, so they can have instructions that are just function calls that go into native code. So execution time order: Native code // *1 JIT // *2 Specific language interpreter // *3 General bytecode interpreter // *4 Parser script interpreter // *5 *1: Native code. C, obj-C, something compiled. everything else I could mention is out of date. *2: Technically JIT is native code, but there's also extra considerations with memory use and cache pressure comes into play slightly. After the ball gets rolling it just eats more memory but cache and execution speed are fine. *3: A specific language interpreter might call a native code strcpy() function instead of have an insn for CALL that goes into a bytecode implementation of strcpy(), or having an insn for CALL that goes into a bytecode strcpy() that just sets up a binding and calls real native strcpy(). The interpreter would head straight for native land, going function foobar() gets assigned token 0x?? and I'll know what to do when I see it. *4: A general CPU interpreter is going to have to be a CPU emulator. Java and Mono count, for Java and CIL CPUs. These CPUs don't really exist but those interpreters work that way, they even have their own assembly. *5: Some script engines are REALLY FREAKING DUMB and actually send each line through a parser every time they see it, which is megaslow. These usually don't last, or just function as proof of concept until a real bytecode translator gets written to make a specific language interpreter. Maybe, MAYBE by twiddling with a JIT, you could convince it to discard generated bytecode. For example, assuming we're talking about a Python implementation on top Mono, and we can modify Mono any way we want with reasonably little effort: - Python - internal tree (let's say Gimple, like gcc) - Gimple - optimizer (Python) - Gimple (opt) - optimizer (general) - Gimple (opt) - CIL data (for reflection) - FREE: Gimple - CIL (data) - Reflection (CIL) - FREE: CIL data (for reflection) - CIL - CIL optimizer - CIL (opt) - JIT (x86) - While (not satisfied) - The annoying process of dynamic profiling - CIL (opt, profiled) - JIT (x86) - FREE: CIL NOTE: at the FREE CIL data step, we are talking about the Python interpreter freeing the CIL data that it has; Mono has now loaded a copy as CIL code, we don't need to give it to it again, we're done with it. At this point we should have: - A CIL program for a Python interpreter - A CIL interpreter (Mono) - x86 native code for the program Further, you should be able to make the Python interpreter do a number of things: - Translate any Python-written libraries via JIT on a method-for-method basis - Translate Python bindings (Python calling C) to active CIL bindings (to avoid calling back to the interpreter) - Unload most of itself when done (say, when it's been unused for about 5 minutes
Re: Oprofile, swap
Ivan Krstić wrote: On Dec 18, 2007, at 6:27 PM, John Richard Moser wrote: I like to think of programs like kernels, or kernels like programs. Either way, I like to treat applications like microkernels. In the embedded scene, this may actually be critical; maybe you should think that way for the XO, in a little part. Please post a link to this list when you have (proof-of-concept) code available. Forth is the proof of this concept. ;) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: sudo, not su.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd like to draw devel@'s attention to trac bug 5537, which might land sometime soon: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5537 The upshot would be that, instead of logging in directly as root with no password, you would log in directly as *olpc* with no password, and then sudo to root (if you need root). Please comment in the bug if you have strong objections and/or be prepared to try logging in as 'olpc' if 'root' seems to stop working in a new build. +1 Yes, I think logging in directly as root is a misfeature that should go away. Most of the other unix-derived platforms have been doing their best to kill it off or at least reduce its attractiveness... and being able to sudo is usually pretty trivial. --elijah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel Yeah ... sudo is more secure than su. In fact, some systems, for example, the Gentoo LiveCD, scrambles the root password. So you have to do $ sudo su - and then set a password to ssh in as root. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Oprofile, swap
Jordan Crouse wrote: On 18/12/07 12:39 -0500, Chris Ball wrote: Hi, However, you appear to be correct about the oprofile kernel. $ grep OPROFILE config* config-olpc-generic:# CONFIG_OPROFILE is not set It is enabled in our kernel: -bash-3.2# grep OPROFILE /boot/config-2.6.22-20071204.2.olpc.9679b65c8c5ed6e CONFIG_OPROFILE=m Our kernel config lives in olpc-2.6/arch/i386/configs. It is indeed there - but oprofile is still having issues. It seems that the sample data that is being written out is invalid (files are filled with only zeros, as far as I can tell) , and opreport spits back errors, consistant with badly formed sample files. We need some people who understand oprofile to take a look at whats happening and diagnose it. Jordan Uh ... you're from AMD? Can you get CodeAnalyst to work on an XO? That would be $^%$ awesome! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: KDE, QT, and the XO
Bernardo Innocenti wrote: (adding devel@ and Bernhard Rosenkraenzer to Cc list) Samuel Klein wrote: Two questions for you: 1) is anyone working on a slimmed-down version of QT? It looks as though it would be 30M of code and dependencies not in our current image. (see It's always been quite easy to rebuild Qt with stripped down functionality. I've been doing it on both embedded Linux and Windows environments with Qt 3.x. The worst offenders were the large encoding tables for charsets. The problem with KDE applications is that they depend on kdelibs too, which in turn tend to depend on the full blown Qt. Back at the time of KDE 3.0, there used to be options to build stripped down versions of kdelibs on top of Qt/Embedded. Ultimately, you could have Konqueror running off a statically linked binary of 5-6MB. The project was here, but it seems abandoned: http://www.konqueror.org/embedded/ our latest image, emulation works cleanly : wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulation) 2) is anyone working on a KDE package for the XO of any sort? I initially thought that relocating the KDE runtime would be hard. Then I remembered that everything in KDE is relative to $KDEDIR or $QTDIR. So, easy as pie! I gave up on KDE (and Gnome) a couple of years ago because they were so bloated. For about six months I ran XFCE 4.2. I did some beta testing on fairly late betas of XFCE 4.4 and it was starting to look too bloated for me as well. So I ended up using GNUStep/Windowmaker after trying most of the lighter ones. I'm still on it, although I do run Gnome on my Fedora virtual machine. I have to admit I haven't tried matchbox yet, but I have tried Fluxbox/Blackbox, IceWM and Enlightenment. Enlightenment is definitely an aquired taste. :) That said, I don't see the point in putting KDE or even QT on the XO. I know there's a lot of educational software available in and for KDE, but doesn't most of it have lighter-weight alternatives? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Upgrading to Fedora 8
Bernardo Innocenti wrote: Yesterday I tried upgrading yoyride to Fedora 8, to see how much pain it would be. After enabling the fedora repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and tweaking it to make it fetch from version 8, I just did: init 3 yum -y dist-upgrade --exclude poppler init 5 Going to init 3 is necessary to conserve memory, otherwise yum fights with sugar and cranks the system to death. Excluding poppler precents a dependency problem in our custom package. Surprisingly, everything worked perfectly after the update, until I rebotted. Then I got into a minor glitch that prevents input hotplug from working when the X server is run by the unprivileged user olpc (X is a suid binary). If I run X manually from the console, everything works fine. There's probably a stricter check on the EUID somewhere in dbus or in hal. Does the symlink in /boot to the kernel get updated? I've tried smaller-scale updates (just the kernel) and it still reboots into the old kernel. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fake mesh over IP.
Morgan Collett wrote: Yes, the presence service operates either over the mesh, or via a Jabber server if you have Internet access. However due to scalability issues, the G1G1 software is not configured with a real jabber server by default. There is no way we could handle the 100,000 G1G1 laptops trying to connect to the current infrastructure. We are working on server scalability issues for Update.1, at which time there will be a new software release and hopefully a usable server. I do NOT recommend anybody advising G1G1 users to connect to the current developer jabber servers, as that will ensure that those servers become unusable for the development community. Some G1G1 users are going to be sophisticated enough to search the web, find a server URL on the wiki and attempt to collaborate using it. :) I think the real answer is to find a corporate entity who will view this as a marketing opportunity and provide the infrastructure, much like T-Mobile have done with a year of free wireless connectivity. Speaking of such sophisticated G1G1 users, I've built VMware images of ship2, and I can do so for Joyride as well. Is there a place where I could post such images for people who are waiting for their G1G1 hardware, so they can experiment with the interface? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Status of Develop.activity?
C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Dec 5, 2007 10:15 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Finally we have the problem of NO systems programming language being supplied. It's less than 9 MB for the whole C development environment, including a decent collection of *-devel packages. You even get a second language thrown in for free, x86 assembly. Pretty much everything that matters is written in C, including the Python interpreter. I'd be very interested in hearing details of your 'whole C development environment'. By my casual inspection, 'rpm -qi gcc' says that gcc alone is over 10MB, and that *doesn't* include any of the *-devel packages needed to make it actually useful. I believe there has been some work done on identifying a lightweight C development infrastructure; your assistance there would be helpful. --scott Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the XO a platform for learning, not software development? And isn't it supposed to be lightweight and child-friendly? I would dearly love to have Ruby in there, and R, and SBCL, and Guile, and Maxima, and Perl, because I don't know *any* Python. But the philosophy of the machine is that languages other than Python and Squeak/Smalltalk are discouraged. I don't mind learning Python to be able to program the machine. Now, if you truly want a lightweight development environment, install gforth. I believe it's under 2 MB, and it's a full ANS Forth, not the basic low-level Forth that's in the boot firmware. It has, like most Forths, an assembler and dis-assembler. That said, when I get my G1G1, I'm certainly planning to load additional software on a Secure Digital card, but that will probably be cross-compiled on another system, rather than native-compiled on the XO, simply because I've got much bigger workstations to use for compile engines. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
