Hi, After waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long of a delay, I just tagged and built DebXO 0.6. In some ways, it's very polished (I've actually tested all of the desktops myself), in other ways it has a number of regressions (due to Debian updates breaking things, switching to an almost-stock Linus kernel, etc). Either way, I wanted to get it out because people keep asking about it, and dropping jffs2 leads to such a massive improvement.
DebXO is a version of Debian (testing) that is customized for the XO-1 hardware. The 0.6 release adds initial support for the XO-1.5 hardware; however, XO-1.5 is not officially supported. I'll update the wiki with instructions for XO-1.5, for the early adopters. The release can be found here: http://lunge.mit.edu/~dilinger/debxo-0.6/images/ The official wiki is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DebXO CHANGES: - Update distribution to Debian Squeeze. All packages and desktops have been upgraded. This is pretty major; for example, Sugar is now at 0.88, and Gnome at 2.30(ish). - Kernel update. Switch from the olpc-2.6 tree to Linus's linux-2.6 tree (based upon 2.6.37-rc4+). A few pending patches from -next and -mm have been included, but other than that... it's stock. The config closely matches the Debian stock kernel config; at a future date, we'll just switch to a standard Debian 686 kernel. - Switch the nand images from using JFFS2 to UBIFS. This makes an amazing difference in terms of usability. Over time, JFFS2 filesystems get slower as they fragment, while UBIFS doesn't appear to. - Initial XO-1.5 support. It's still rough around the edges, but it's functional (currently xorg.conf and /boot/olpc.fth must be edited). - Switch from autox to nodm for LXDE and XFCE desktops. LXDE usability has been vastly improved (for example, wicd is installed and configured automatically; LXDE can now get online). Webkit-based browsers are used - less ram thrashing throughout. - KDE image has been dropped (at least for now). KDE4 took at least 10 minutes to start up and then crashed, so.. I'll deal with it another time. Patches to make it work accepted! - Awesome image has been dropped. I'd intended to replace this with XMonad (as that's what I actually use), but currently that requires some tweaking and needs to drop about 300MB of devel libs. So for now, it's just dropped. - Base images have been dropped. The 0.5 base image was broken, and, well... I don't see much demand for it. - Hal is no longer used (except for some legacy stuff in the XFCE images). Key bindings are pulled from DMI and loaded by udev (note: upgrade your version of OFW if hitting the 'fn' key results in lots of '='s. Alternatively, add "/lib/udev/keymap /dev/input/event0 olpc-xo" to your /etc/rc.local to auto-load the proper keymap). Lots of misc other changes can be seen at: http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=summary KNOWN BUGS: - Power management is currently not enabled. It's on the roadmap. - KDE and Awesome images are disabled (for DebXO 0.6). - The camera driver is disabled due to a crash in the kernel. - Upon first bootup, the LXDE and XFCE desktops display a wicd error. It only happens on the first boot, so I think it's related to copying files around. Just restart and it'll go away. - Also upon first bootup, if you reboot XFCE via the menu (logout->reboot), it appears to kill the panel prior to saving the startup applications. This means that when XFCE boots up the second time, there's no panel or desktop. I believe that this is an XFCE bug; after the first boot, using the menu to reboot doesn't break anything. So, just open up a terminal and "sudo reboot" the first time, if using XFCE. - Nodm doesn't currently set ~/.Xauthority; see http://bugs.debian.org/605633 . This means gksu (and gksudo) are broken. For now, just open up a terminal and call (for example) "sudo synaptic". - The volume/brightness keys are mapped to function keys. It's unclear how best to handle this, as it is useful to have f11, for example. Will figure something out later. - Due to a switch from Hal to udev and upower, battery status reporting is broken. This is fixed with a pending kernel update, but it's in the process of being pushed upstream (and therefore will be fixed in 0.7). INSTALLATION ONTO NAND FLASH: To install onto the XO's NAND flash, download the jffs2/$DESKTOP.dat and jffs2/$DESKTOP.img to a USB or SD stick (where $DESKTOP is one of the various desktops - gnome, lxde, xfce, or sugar). Boot into OFW (make sure your XO is unlocked!), and run update-nand disk:\$DESKTOP.img or update-nand sd:\$DESKTOP.img (depending upon whether you downloaded to an SD or USB disk). If update-nand spits out any errors, make sure you're running an appropriately up-to-date version of OFW. The q2d* series do not support update-nand, and versions q2e18 and q2e19 are known to be buggy with partitions. Firmware and instructions for upgrading can be found here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware INSTALLATION ONTO SD/USB: To install onto an SD or USB device, download the ext3/debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz file, and run zcat debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz > /dev/mmcblk0 or zcat debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz > /dev/sdX (depending upon whether you're writing to an SD or USB disk). Note that this will overwrite any data that is on the SD or USB disk. USAGE: By default, a user 'olpc' is created (with no password, and sudo access). Some desktops automatically start a display manager and log you in; some do not. The root password is disabled by default. This is a stock Debian Lenny system with only a few modifications, so it can obviously be tailored. HACKING: xodist is the name of the collection of scripts that are used to produce DebXO. The git repository can be downloaded via: git clone git://lunge.mit.edu/git/xodist There's also a web interface to that: http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=summary Help is always appreciated! :) _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel