Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’ve been playing around with my XO laptop (you can read all about it over at hackszine) and it’s an extremely cool, super-hackable device. You should order one. The price is right: for $400, you:

• Donate a laptop to a child
• Get one of your own
• Get a $200 tax deduction
• Get one free year of T-Mobile Hotspot

Also, Tom Hoffman and I are organizing an XO Laptop meetup in RI. Check out the thread here and reply if you’re interested. We may wait a few weeks, since it could take a while for people to get their orders.

I posted an entry a while back about getting this to work under an earlier beta of Fedora Core 5. I think these instructions are much more straightforward. You’ll need to go through the installation. I suggest using text mode if you can (I specified “text expert” when I was installing).

When installation is finished, and you are prompted to reboot, use Alt-F2 to switch to a virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you are in X11). Then, mount the install media:

# cd /tmp
# mknod hdc b 22 0
# mkdir /mnt/cdrom
# mount /tmp/hdc /mnt/cdrom

Copy the i586 kernel over to root’s home directory on the new system:

# cp /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/kernel-*i586* /mnt/sysimage/root

Unmount and eject the install media and chroot into the new system:

# umount /mnt/cdrom/
# eject /tmp/hdc
# chroot /mnt/sysimage/

Install the kernel and exit the chroot:

chroot# cd root/
chroot# rpm --force -Uvh kernel-*i586.rpm
chroot# exit

Use Alt-F1 (or Alt-F7 if you were in X11) to return to the installer, and
reboot as prompted.

I’ll be giving a short talk and demonstration on Ubuntu Hacks today (Wednesday, April 5 at 12:30) at the O’Reilly LinuxWorld booth. Drop by and learn about getting Ubuntu running under colinux, going online with a Bluetooth connection and a cell phone, and a few more things.

I probably said “but at least the kernel is free software” one too many
times at OSCON. Miguel
says “I noticed that Open Source proponents using MacOS X have developed
highly tuned excuses, similar to those that smokers have about why
cigarettes are good for you.”

Guilty as charged. I’ve been saying for a while that Mac OS X is holding
the door open for Linux, and I am waiting for all the pieces to fall
into place, at least in a way that satisfies me. I took a first step a
couple of weeks ago by installing YDL on my PowerBook, but I
haven’t booted into it too much. However, Slashdot
reports that the next version of YDL is coming soon, so I’ll have to
check that out.

Edd
has this to say: “one of the things which perennially disappoints me is
the number of OS X machines there in the hands of free software
hackers”, but he also goes on to list the must-have apps, and talks a
bit about installing Linux (with the same conclusion I have, that Debian
is da bomb). Right now, I’m splitting my time roughly 60% Mac OS X, 20%
Linux, 20% Windows XP. Maybe by next OSCON, I’ll be back to using Linux
most of the time.

Russell
Beattie: “Okay, but there was a tiny problem: The NTFS partition has
40GB available, but the disk image is only 30GB…”

Great stuff in
this post–Russell goes on to use ntfsresize to solve the problem. Damn!
If I had known about that utility a couple weeks ago, I would not have
spent so much time screwing around with Ghost and Drive Image.

Jeremy Geelan interviewed me on the expo floor of LinuxWorld Expo and put our ramblings up
online.

Dashboard looks pretty cool.
I managed to get it up and running on Mandrake 9.1 by installing mono 0.26 and gtksharp 0.10 from source,
and then installing the latest
Ximian Evolution (so I could get libgtkhtml 3.0.2, which Dashboard
depends on). Once I had those pieces in place, these
instructions for getting dashboard up and running worked for me.

After reading the README that comes with Dashboard, I also installed sqlite and made sure I
had the the SQL Lite Data
Provider (it’s included with the mono-0.26 release, and you should
be able to find it in
/usr/local/lib/Mono.Data.SqliteClient.dll) sqlite is needed to create
the full-text index, which probably won’t be all that meaningful until
I’ve lived in this Linux installation a little bit longer, so I copied a
bunch of .txt files into ~/Documents and ran these commands (this
assumes the dashboard source lives in ~/src):

mkdir -p ~/.dashboard/backend-data/text-index/sources
cd ~/src/dashboard/index
make
mono text-indexer.exe -i `find ~/Documents -iname "*.txt"`

Finally, I launched dashboard and ran this modified version
of the clue script as root, which sniffs all my Google queries (using ngrep) and hrefs
inside web documents and sends the data as clue packets to dashboard.