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[chibicthulhu]

Hey all, this is my first post, but I've been monitoring these forums for months now. Being a total Linux newb, I was wondering what the difference is between having Ubuntu on my XO and having xfce on my XO? I've already got xfce to work quite nicely, and I find it very useful, despite some drawbacks. (Can't change the clock or calender, having troubles installing new software, etc.) Would it be worth my time to get Ubuntu on my laptop?

[quixote]

Argotnaut: yes, but sometimes I do use ubuntu like that. And other linuxen.   

I don't mean after xfce has loaded.  I mean before you start xfce, when you have the login prompt.  At that point it should be possible to log straight into root, not just "olpc" user.  That's where my problem is.  After I've started xfce, the olpc user password allows me to use sudo, but that wasn't what I meant.

So, any other answers?  ??

[humptybump]

chibicthulhu: "Xfce" is a windowing system. Put anouther way, it is the basic user experience. The XO uses Sugar as its default user experience.

WindowsXP is actually the base Windows core + Microsoft's windowing system. Apple Leonard is flavor of Linux with the Mac OS X windowing system. The OLPC ships with a modified version of Fedora Linux as the core OS + Sugar as the windowing system. As you have discovered, you can use Xfce rather than Sugar on your XO.

Both Sugar and Xfce can run on top of many different operating systems - Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. If you use Google, you will find some people have taken desktop computers and installed Ubuntu with Sugar as the windowing system.

What moocapiean has documented here is Ubuntu with Xfrce as the basic windowing system. This combination is also called Xbuntu. The same core with a GNOME windowing system is call Ubuntu and with the KDE windowing system is called Kbuntu.

So, long story short, if you want more than a text interface to an operating system, you add a windowing system to it. Thru these forums and elsewhere, we  are exploring various combinations of core operating systems + various windowing systems.

Welcome to the party!

[Eph Zero]

@chibicthulhu, I would say it depends on how much you want to experiment. If you find XFCE useful as it is now, then I'd just leave it as it is. If you want to customize and learn things, then I'd go for the full-on Xubuntu installation.

Also, I think you could probably make this into a whole new thread and get people to notice your question more.

P.S. I think I did get my clock set right when I was running plain old XFCE, but I don't remember exactly how I did it. Sorry.

[quixote]

chibichthulhu:  ubuntu is the actual operating system, like sugar is on the XO as shipped.  Xfce is a window manager, in other words it's the graphical front end.  It can be a graphical front end for sugar just as easily, which sounds like what you've done.

Assuming you have another computer with a cd drive lying around the house, I'd suggest downloading an xubuntu LiveCD from http://www.xubuntu.org/get.  If you run that cd without installing, it can give you an idea of what xubuntu itself is like. 

Ubuntu comes with the "gnome" graphical front end.  Kubuntu comes with the kde graphical front end, and Xubuntu comes with xfce, which is what you want to use on the XO.  The other two take up too much system memory to be a good idea, although I think I heard that some people have done that.

Then, if you decide you do want a dual boot XO, just follow the instructions at the beginning of this thread....

[sracer]

Hey all, this is my first post, but I've been monitoring these forums for months now. Being a total Linux newb, I was wondering what the difference is between having Ubuntu on my XO and having xfce on my XO? I've already got xfce to work quite nicely, and I find it very useful, despite some drawbacks. (Can't change the clock or calender, having troubles installing new software, etc.) Would it be worth my time to get Ubuntu on my laptop?

Others have provided some great technical explanations.  I'll skip that and move on to answer your question. (which is what I ended up doing)

I recommend reverting the XO back to its initial ship state of "customized Fedora+Sugar" so that you can have a "true" XO experience available.  Maybe install Opera to have a full-fledged browser and maybe tweak the Write keymap to unlock the full Abiword UI.

Then, use moocapiean's instructions and install Ubuntu+Xfce on an SD card.  Use atraw's olpc.fth files and what you'll end up with is an XO configuration with dual boot capabilities.... boot up Sugar or boot up Ubuntu+Xfce.

With this setup I can boot up Ubuntu+Xfce and tinker around all that I want.  Install apps.  Accidentally break things.  If I need to, it is simple to rebuild the image on the SD card using the instructions... and when a new build of Sugar is available, I won't have to worry about reapplying all of the tweaks and patches to it.

I

[chibicthulhu]

Some of that helps, but what I really wanna know is if it's any easier to install new programs and customize my experience with ubuntu. If it is, it'd totally be worth it for me to start over again and put it on my laptop. If it isn't, I reckon I'll stay with what I got. I realize it's not gonna  be as black and white as that, of course. Thanks for all the input.

[quixote]

Chibicthulhu:  yes, much easier to install programs.  You'll have synaptic at your beck and call, which is debian's & ubuntu's strongest points.  (Deb & ubu are pretty closely related.)  Try out the Live CD.  Really.

And the neat thing about moocapeian's & freelikegnu's install is the whole thing is on an SD card or USB drive, so you're not using up the XO's limited 1GB of flash memory.  New programs also install on the extra card/usb that you're using (so make sure it's at least 2GB!)  (I'd say don't use HighCapacity SD.  I had no end of trouble trying that.)

[ashtond33]

To moocapiean: Did you do any "trimming" of the ubuntu install? I ask this out of curiosity, and because I am having trouble getting my bluetooth dongle recognized. Nothing seems to appear when i lsusb

[moocapiean]

To moocapiean: Did you do any "trimming" of the ubuntu install? I ask this out of curiosity, and because I am having trouble getting my bluetooth dongle recognized. Nothing seems to appear when i lsusb

Well, I didn't trim a regular Ubuntu (or Xubuntu) installation, I didn't even start from one.  Instead, I installed only the minimum amount of things to get a nice Ubuntu-type system.  Because of that, things many of us are used to with (X)Ubuntu probably won't be there.  I did add some things I wanted and figured many others would want too, but I'm sure there are many things I didn't think to add.

[wiseguy]

I'm getting an error when I boot from SD card with the modified olpc.fth . and the system proceeds to boot from the NAND memory.

"Can't open disk label package"

Any thoughts on what might be missing?

[wiseguy]

HUmmm, looks like others have had trouble booting form high capacity SD cards... bah

time to try my 1gb usb key

[wiseguy]

Ok, again, no luck with a 1GB Kingston usb key and the above instructions.

Seems that I keep getting stuck with messages saying it can't find a boot device.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Secure_Digital_card this says that it supports Fat 16 and 32... however Ext3 works fine once you mount it (except with Journal)

So.. what's next for me? Do I need to reflash the nand to a different version?

HELP!

[moocapiean]

I haven't updated changed anything on my XO (other than download the developer key), so I don't think you need to reflash nand, although I never tried using an SD card.

From what you describe, I wonder if you set the partition name to OLPCRoot.  If it's mounted onto /media/OLPCRoot in Sugar, then that's not the problem.  To see where it's mounted, insert the device and wait a few moments for the system to mount it, then run mount and it should show up as the last thing printed.

[quixote]

wiseguy: can't find boot device was the same message I kept getting.  As I recall, the problem was solved by following the instructions about making sure there was a  ...../security/.private directory where expected, and by using atraw's olpc.fth file with the three different multiboot options. (I think that's the one now linked in the instructions.)

I didn't do anything extreme like reflashing nand.

What did happen once was that somehow all my carefully installed files on the sd card had just disappeared.  I spent two hours trying to get it to boot, finally checked the card, and there was nothing on it!  I think the XO has a bad attitude to sd cards  .  (I reinstalled, and everything has been fine ever since.)