next »

[moocapiean]

I'm not sure where in the instructions you're getting stuck, so my advice below may not address your problem.

I have to image on a usb drive

Do you mean you installed the image onto the USB drive or that you downloaded it and have it on one USB drive to install on another?  Putting the image itself onto a drive won't do anything.  You need to copy the contents onto the drive using dd as described in the instructions.

when I try to go into the directory i type cd and then /dev/sda1 for the usb with nothing on it (cd /dev/sda1).  When it does that it says "no directories,"

The location /dev/sda1 is just a file, so there aren't any directories within it.  In fact, since sda1 is a file, it's not possible to cd into it since cd only works with directories.

I'm not really sure why you're trying to cd into /dev anyway.  Did you accidentally misread cd /media/sdb1 as cd /dev/sdb1?

[cyli]

[Note:  Edited after I found my answer three posts down (yes I'm stupid ) ]

I was having a problem whereby after following the instructions in this post exactly (also the instructions here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ubuntu_On_OLPC_XO), I would get the following when I booted up:

Boot device: /sd/disk:\boot\olpc.fth Arguments:
Boot device: /sd/disk:\boot\vmlinuz Arguments: ro root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=1 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 fbcon=font:SUN12x22
Loading ramdisk image from disk:\boot\olpcrd.img ...

[OLPC logo] [SD card icon][unlocked icon].

It would then hang forever at this screen.  From this post in this forum, however, I found out that a line reading "unfreeze" needs to be added to the olpc.fth.

So if anyone else is having this problem, see if that fixes it

[MarkS]

Shouldn't this line:

  cp -ra /etc/modprobe.d /media/OLPCRoot/modprobe.d

be like this:

  cp -ra /etc/modprobe.d /media/OLPCRoot/etc/modprobe.d

?

Thanks,
Mark

[moocapiean]

Oops, I'm surprised it's lasted this long.  I fixed the instructions. Thanks!

[MarkS]

Yeah! It works!

Comments

• The instructions have you carefully copy over /etc/fstab from the original machine. But post 1525 suggests that you need to set up your own /etc/fstab (on the flash). This seems to be the case
• However, the fstab in 1525 wants you to mount ext3. The raw image file needs ext2
• According to the developer key documentation, the machine will look at the security directory of your thumb drive. So you don't need to compromise the security of your main machine -- everything can happen on the thumb drive.
• As an aside, my OLPC would not boot with the thumb drive plugged in (unless booting from the thumb drive). This is probably a security feature.
  
  

Questions

• Is there an easy way to change the resolution on the machine? The resolution is too high (fine detail) for my aged eyes.

Thanks for all the work!

[MarkS]

On mine, CTL-F brings up an xterm box. I'm looking all over where to fix this. CTL-F interferes with an awful lot of common uses.

Ok...Answering my own question in case anyone else runs into it. Apparently there's nearly a half dozen ways to set up key mappings. In this case, there were some key mappings inside a file in the olpc home directory that work with the xbindkeys utility (look for a file that starts with .xbindkeys).

// Mark

[moocapiean]

• Is there an easy way to change the resolution on the machine? The resolution is too high (fine detail) for my aged eyes.

I tried changing the screen resolution through Xfce (XfceMenu -> Settings -> Display Settings), but there was just one resolution, Default.

So, I tried changing the resolution in the display configuration file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf), but it had no effect.  After restarting the X server, the resolution was still the same, so I think the settings there were ignored.

It might be best to mess around with some of the settings or maybe install a theme for Xfce that makes things bigger.  You can find a lot of themes at: http://www.xfce-look.org/

[MarkS]

I tried changing the screen resolution through Xfce (XfceMenu -> Settings -> Display Settings), but there was just one resolution, Default.

Thanks for trying. I've been playing with font settings, though the system sometimes seems to be ignoring them. I'll have to look at those themes.

The good news is that I got OpenOffice Calc to install.

At first I had trouble installing anything. Got "hash sum" errors. I reformatted the remainder of my 2G flash and made it into swap memory. After that I was able to install some things (emacs, c++, gparted, and a 7 meg pdf file).

But I still wasn't able to install OpenOffice Calc. It could successfully retrieve only about half of the necessary files.

Why do I want OO Calc? The makers of the OLPC have suggested that you could use Google docs to do spreadsheets. But in both Ubuntu and OLPC mode Gmail stalls out and offers to go into "basic mode". In basic mode, you can't access Google docs. If there is some other way to access them, I don't know what it is. But I expect they would stall out too.

Synaptic allows you to save a script of files to be downloaded. I set up to install OO Calc and then saved the script. I brought the flash over to another machine and ran the script. Then I moved the resulting files back over to the flash and booted back into ubuntu-on-a-stick. Using the Synaptic loader, I was then able to install the OO Calc. I haven't tested it at all, but at least it comes up and lets me type, save, change fonts, etc. Whether it could hold up doing any real work remains to be seen. I'm not sure if I'll keep it, since it takes 200 megs of space! Probably if I do keep it I should go ahead and install the other elements since they all share the same core which is part of the 200 megs.

Now what I want is a way to fsck the drive with corrections before the boot mounts root. Linux doesn't seem to know how shut down USB drives cleanly. I've noticed this on other systems. If I use the suggested fstab settings, the stick would never mount! It would fix itself, reboot (but not cleanly), find more errors, reboot ... etc. The only way was to turn off fsck'ing in the fstab. This means I have to remember to do it manually, either by alternately booting into OLPC or using another machine. Otherwise the errors accumulate and the system becomes corrupted beyond use.

Thanks!
Mark

[lusth]

I got the deaded:

tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

After removing my usb drive and reinserting it:

tune2fs /dev/sdb1 -L OLPCRoot

worked!

john

[lusth]

Ok, I followed the recipe but no go. When I boot with the check key
pressed, the display immediately shows the trying the nand flash
internal drive, skipping over the USB drive completely (e.g. it doesn't
even test for security, etc.).

I use linux as my only environment, so I don't think I got the
instructions wrong.

I have an eeeXubuntu install on another thumb drive and when I
try to boot that, the XO checks that drive before failing and going
onto the internal flash drive.

Any suggestions for pinpointing the problem?

john

[lusth]

Nevermind.

I think it's because I haven't installed my developer key yet.

john

[richf]

Any reports with satisfaction of running ubuntu on the XO once you're done with the install?  Things like:
- Is there a sleep mode, and if so is it reasonably responsive and fast?
- Any problems with hardware support (e.g. sound, wifi)
- Is it speedier than sugar?  I was wondering if Xubuntu might still be a bit too heavyweight.  I installed it recently on an old (128 MB, 300ish MHz) laptop, and it feels slower than the Win2K that had been on it before.
If this isn't the right thread for this, feel free to point me in the right direction.
Thanks.
- Rich

[moocapiean]

There isn't a sleep mode.  I tried hibernate and suspend and neither worked.  I'd like to try again with a partition that it can write to, but for now, it doesn't work.

The only hardware support problem I can think of is with SD cards.  Some who install Xubuntu on SD cards have problems.  There've also been mouse problems The trackpad is killing me! Help! (Ubuntu+xfce)), but it seems like that's been adequately solved.

It's probably faster than sugar, but I don't have any numbers on that.  Awhile ago, I took some memory measurements.  They're hidden in the Ubuntu on the XO thread: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=917.msg10108#msg10108
Basically, Sugar uses about twice as much memory as Xfce, so my guess is that Xfce is faster.

[MarkS]

Got it working on a card now. Not sure if there aren't some data errors happening.

I set up a new user. The "switch user" thing doesn't seem to work. You have to logout, drop out to the command line prompt, login, and then restart xfce.

Also the new user doesn't have the windows set up appropriately. Some of it I can figure out, but I'm not sure how to get the network manager applet into a panel. Maybe I should just copy over the settings from the OLPC account.

Thanks!
Mark

[moocapiean]

This has been a problem a few others encountered.  I wrote a post covering some common after-installation tasks, but I think it fell off the front page by now.  Anyway, you can see how to create a new account from the existing olpc account at Beyond the Ubuntu Installation.  Feel free to post back if you run into any problems!