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[teapot]

Can you make a flash plugin that will play acceptably in the XO?...

No, however specifically for Youtube and Google Video you can use this: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2240.msg22038#msg22038

[colinwhipple]

Someone here successfully installed KDE, so I think Gnome would work fine as well.  Just that you may be short in system RAM.

Try:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

and see what happens...

That worked for the install.  But it used up even more space than teapot suggested it might.  Now I am going to follow his other suggestion and delete some unneeded stuff.

[mavrothal]

Thanks once more Teapot.
I incorporated some of you commends in the original post.

[teapot]

Right-click on the terminal in the top drop-down menu select ‘properties’ and click on the ‘+’ sign of the window that opens. Give a name (“Find” in this case), a description if you want, select the terminal icon from the pop-up menu, type kfind in the command field and check the ‘Use sturtup notification’ box. Repeat for Archiver using the karchive command instead if kfind.

It would be better to organize applications by purpose and add launcher icons to the panel rather than group allof them under terminal. Right-click anywhere on the panel, select "Add new item", choose "launcher" and select name, icon and a command to run. First (and usually the only) item for every launcher entry will show up on the panel, the rest will be in pulldown menu.

You can also install xfce4-mcs-plugins-extra package, and it will add Xfce settings manager will add, among other things, a menu editor. By default it edits main menu, though you can add more menu entries to the panel with various menus.

As yet another way to add application launcher, you can create a something.desktop file in Desktop directory.

For example:

Code:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=xterm
Comment=X Terminal
Exec=xterm -fa "Deja Sans Mono" -fs 17
Icon=gnome-terminal

will start X terminal with a large smooth font. Once this file is created, you can right-click on it, and use launcher editor to change its parameters, icon, etc.

4) Internationalize your installation if you need it (edited to incorporate teapot’s comments on posts #9, #11 and #14 in this tread)
If you just want to type in another language
In synaptic type your language name eg “polish” get the aspell-pl (dictionary), the language-pack-pl and its depentencies and the fbxkb packages. I got just these and works fine.

Right click on the bottom panel select 'add new item' and pick 'keyboard Layout Switcher' from the list to place a small icon with the current language that also allows you to switch languages by clicking it.

To add the new keyboard layout  go to the ubuntu menu>settings>settings manager click on the keyboard and then on the layouts tab. Un-check the ‘Use X configuration’ box click the ‘+Add’ button and add your language.

To change the layout with a keyboard shortcut combination you have to go to the terminal (…) and type
nano .xfse4_startup

.xfce4_startup

At the bottom of the file that opens add the line:
setxkbmap -option "grp:shifts_toggle"” to change layout pressing both shift keys or
setxkbmap -option "grp:alt_shift_toggle" to change by Alt+Shift

5) To change the GUI in another language 
You need, in addition to the packages described at 4 above, to get with synaptic the language-pack-gnome-pl   package  (in my example).  The log out and in the login screen select your interface language either from the left-most button on the bottom bar (‘Options’) or the 3rd from the left (usually marked ‘Last language’)
That’s it!

Keep in mind that changing the settings here will also change the format of time and date, numerical parameters eg decimal point symbol etc. If you want a mixed environment  (eg Polish interface and US decimal point) you need either
A) to use the terminal (…) and change some variable in the  invible .profile file by typing nano .profile and then changing/adding the selected parameters as described in teapot's posts #11 and #14 at the bottom of this page. For example to have a US numerical system and a Polish (in our example) GUI you add a new line at the bottom of the file that looks like this
export LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
Make sure that you do not add lines between the lines that start with if and fi (this call for conditional variables) and that your line does not have a # in the beginning (these are comment lines)
B) Go to synaptic and get the the language-package-kde-pl, language-support-pl, kde-i18n-pl, and kde-systemsettings  packages and their dependencies. The last one allows for various interface tweaks including “regional and language” from a control panel-like application that is placed under ubuntu menu. From there you can install your second language and other things. The down-site of this approach is that you burden and slowdown your XO. You install 2 libraries, 5 windows, 20 panels, 50 buttons and 200 icons (more or less  ) to type 20 lines in the terminal for you…

If you don't have KDE applications, you don't have to install KDE language support, however it won't hurt to have it.

6) Install Skype (if you prefer it over other VoIP applications)
First update your Synaptic repositories with medibuntu  an Ubuntu data base for propitiatory applications like skype. This is also good for other applications
Now open the terminal (…) and type
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
when it finishes type
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
It will ask you to accept a package that cannot be authenticated. Type  y.
Now, open synaptic search for skype, download  the skype package and its dependencies and when it finishes look for Skype in the Ubuntu>Network menu.
After you login in Skype open the Skype Options by right clicking on the small icon at the bottom bar, and pick “CS5535 Audio (hw:Audio, 0)” for Sound-in and Sound-out in the Sound Devices panel. Un-check  the “Enable Skype Video” box in the Video devices panel.  Video works but the quality is unacceptable and more important is crashing skype after few seconds.
That’s it! Works like a charm.

Personally I prefer Ekiga -- it works with SIP protocol used by "real" VoIP providers. If you enable video with it, Ekiga will complain about incompatible camera format if you won't install libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2 package and choose V4L2 for video input.

-ADOBE FLASH-
I also installed flash 10 beta 2 following the instructions for manual installation in the Abobe page. Seems a bit faster that Flash 9 but I’m not sure it worth’s the effort and is not easy to uninstall either…

The plugin is in libflashplayer.so file, installed somewhere (depends on what you told the installer to do, and if you ran it as root or as normal user).

-WINE-
Finally, I tried to install WINE (a windows emulator for the Linux) that allows some windows application to run in Linux, even if it’s probably way too “heavy” for the XO. Installed OK via Synaptic but then the configuration totally failed with multiple problems  (from opening drive_c to audio device identification). If anyone managed to Install WINE under Ubuntu Hardpot in the XO and it can actually be used at bearable speeds, PLEASE let us know how.

Wine on XO is slow, so I only can recommend it as the last resort. For most of its potential uses (games, graphics editing) XO would be too slow anyway, so I strongly recommend to look for a native Linux application before touching Wine, no matter how much you are accustomed to some particular Windows application. I have seen pretty ridiculous things that people did with Wine -- for example, running mIRC, despite the fact that XChat is far superior to it (but virtually unknown to Windows users).

I also recommend installing OpenOffice.org if you need Office-like functionality and compatibility with Microsoft Office format, GIMP for image editing and Inkscape for vector editing. Take into account that you will probably have to zoom a lot when editing graphics on XO -- otherwise you will see the image in "XO screen colors".

[mavrothal]

No, however specifically for Youtube and Google Video you can use this: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2240.msg22038#msg22038

I did, and see what happened  http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2240.msg24412#msg24412

[mavrothal]

.xfce4_startup

Thanks for catching this. I corrected it

t would be better to organize applications
....
....

As usually... THANKS.

I also recommend installing OpenOffice.org if you need Office-like functionality and compatibility with Microsoft Office format, GIMP for image editing and Inkscape for vector editing. Take into account that you will probably have to zoom a lot when editing graphics on XO -- otherwise you will see the image in "XO screen colors".

I have tried them both. You really have to be desperate  to use them in the XO. OpenOffice maybe, if you get a Powepoint or Excel attachment on the road and the XO is the only machine around,  but picture editing... I'll live with the bad picture

[teapot]

As yet another way to add application launcher, you can create a something.desktop file in Desktop directory.

For example:

Code:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=xterm
Comment=X Terminal
Exec=xterm -fa "Deja Sans Mono" -fs 17
Icon=gnome-terminal

will start X terminal with a large smooth font. Once this file is created, you can right-click on it, and use launcher editor to change its parameters, icon, etc.

Almost forgot -- desktop launchers can be added by right-clicking on any existing icon on the desktop, selecting "Desktop" submenu and "Create Launcher" from there.

[colinwhipple]

Someone here successfully installed KDE, so I think Gnome would work fine as well.  Just that you may be short in system RAM.

Try:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

and see what happens...

That worked for the install.  But it used up even more space than teapot suggested it might.  Now I am going to follow his other suggestion and delete some unneeded stuff.

The process of deleting unneeded stuff didn't work so well.  Apparently some of the stuff I deleted was needed, and my SD ended up unbootable.

Luckily, I had previously followed one of the sets of instructions here:

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2564.0

and was able to get it back from the backup.

[mavrothal]

The process of deleting unneeded stuff didn't work so well.  Apparently some of the stuff I deleted was needed, and my SD ended up unbootable.

Did you delete manually, with Synaptic, apt-get, other?

Luckily, I had previously followed one of the sets of instructions here:

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2564.0

Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I took a look and appears fairly complicated and "terminal heavy".
What in your experience would be the minimal successful set of commands to take a system image?
Do you know if there are any reliable  Ubuntu GUI Disk cloning applications like for the mainstream OSs?

[colinwhipple]

The process of deleting unneeded stuff didn't work so well.  Apparently some of the stuff I deleted was needed, and my SD ended up unbootable.

Did you delete manually, with Synaptic, apt-get, other?

Luckily, I had previously followed one of the sets of instructions here:

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2564.0

Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I took a look and appears fairly complicated and "terminal heavy".
What in your experience would be the minimal successful set of commands to take a system image?
Do you know if there are any reliable  Ubuntu GUI Disk cloning applications like for the mainstream OSs?

I used Synaptic for the deletions.

I used tangomike's instructions in Post #14, at the end of the first page of that thread.  However, I had about four different attempts before I got a good backup, and I don't know what I did different the last time to get it to work.

[colinwhipple]

I used Synaptic for the deletions.

I used tangomike's instructions in Post #14, at the end of the first page of that thread.  However, I had about four different attempts before I got a good backup, and I don't know what I did different the last time to get it to work.

I should have mentioned:

I have Linux installed on my big laptop.  I did the backup and restore on the SD reader in that computer.

[mavrothal]

I used tangomike's instructions in Post #14, at the end of the first page of that thread. 

Thanks for the info.

So I booted in Sugar (is still on your XO, right?...) and put an 1GB USB stick in one USB port (standard  over the counter used on a mac, pc and XO before with no special formatting or anything)
Opened the terminal (even sugar has it…) and typed
su
df    
and noticed where the USB and SD were mounted. Also noticed the occupied and the available space, is important. The SD is at /media/OLPCRoot and the USB at /media/StickName. Then typed
cd /media/OLPCRoot
tar cvzf /media/StickName/Hardtop09082008.tgz ./
You can give to your tgz file any name you want of course… 45 minutes later my 1.7GB data on the SD had been compressed to a 680MB file in the USB . This gives you an idea of the kind of USB that you’ll need. Keep in mind that video , images and already compressed archives do not compress any further. So if you have a lot of them expect smaller compression ratios and bigger USB sticks.
Unfortunately I do not have another SD card handy to test the validity of the backup.  And do not feel like erasing the working one... However when I tried to expanded the tgz file via a macintosh terminal in a macintosh folder it stopped when it reached the /dev directory because the make nod operation was not permitted by the system (I guess Mac OS is “almost” Unix…). It could also be that there is something wrong with the process. However, when I spot checked some already expended directories ALL the files were there with the right size and date and mostly identical permissions.
If you have any further idea please let me know.
Now if everything was fine the reverse operation would be pretty simple also. I would boot again in Sugar, open the terminal and type
su
cd /media/OLPCRoot
tar xvzf /media/StickName/Hardtop09082008.tgz
and 45 minutes later I should have your old system. Of course the SD card should be first erased and formatted as before the original Ubundu Hardpot installation.
If you have an extra card handy and you try it let me know.

[Eddie Owens]

mavrothal, I tried the method you outlined in the above post, and it seemed to work well (I did it several days ago, and I am posting from the cloned copy).

My source was a 4 GB SD card, and the (intermediate) destination was a 2 GB VFAT formatted USB stick.  It took 72 minutes to compress and move the 2.1 GB source to a 790MB .tgz file.

The final destination was a PNY 4GB SDHC card, which I had used previously, and as a precaution I did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4096 count=1 prior to formatting and adding a file system (as mentioned by teapot in topic=2240 #18), and naming the file system OLPCRoot.

After cd'ing to /media/OLPCRoot, it took about 34 minutes to un-tar the file and create the clone.

While all of this was not terribly fast, it has the distinct advantage of being able to do it all using only the XO.

Thanks, this method seemed to work well.

Edit: This procedure of creating a backup of one's Ubuntu (residing on SD card) was conducted by booting into Sugar, opening a terminal as superuser, compressing/copying Ubuntu to a USB stick, creating fresh bootable partition on another SD card with ext3 file system, and copying/decompressing the Ubuntu file on the SD card.
 
 

[Noob-Bob]

I picked up another XO on e-bay and am trying to install Intrepid on it.  I updated the OS to 8.2 and got a developer code, and was fiddling around with trying to copy the dev_key to my backup SD chip, since I figured that the developer key is unique to each XO.  I did the cd /security/* security stuff onto a USB chip, and was trying to copy it from the USB to my backup SD chip and got several "file is read-only" error messages. 

Then I got the bright idea of just shoving the backup SD chip into the new XO and seeing what happens when I hit the power button, and it just worked, password, overclocking, wireless everything. 

So, are all of the developer keys the same?  Did I just get lucky or what?

I thought if nothing else, it might keep someone else from trying to copy the developer key from one XO to a system chip for another XO.

[mavrothal]

So, are all of the developer keys the same?  Did I just get lucky or what?

I thought if nothing else, it might keep someone else from trying to copy the developer key from one XO to a system chip for another XO.

No you didn't :-) http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2240.msg26456#msg26456
However is good to remind us.