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[Eddie Owens]

Mavrothal, I just followed the trail blazed by MrDuck85 and you in recent comments.

Using Synaptic, I identified all the files having to do with XFCE, and marked them for removal; then added gnome.   I found the "genome-desktop-enviornment" in synaptic, and decided to try that first, and if something seemed to be lacking, go back and add the individual files that MrDuck85 indicated (I was doing this on a backup, so that if I clobbered a critical file all would not be lost).  And then checked apply, then rebooted.

The reboot went to the log-in page, and there I had to go to options and choose a gnome session to proceed.  olpc/olpcolpc worked fine to get me past the gatekeeper, and then I was presented with the gnome desktop, which seems considerably richer than XFCE (I'm sure I could have added most of these new things to XFCE however).

While I did not do any testing with a stopwatch, just moving about from one program to another, opening things, closing things, Teapot's Ubuntu/gnome does not SEEM very different in terms of response time from Teapot's Ubuntu/XFCE.  I have not yet installed any "heavy duty" programs like Open Office, so cannot comment on what stress would do to the performance.

My installation with the gnome UI occupied 1.86 GB.

Thinking about the log-in screen and the fact that I could choose what kind of "session" I wanted, I wondered if I could have both gnome and XFCE options.

So I went back to Synaptic and did a search on XFCE, identifying those files with "XFCE" in filename or description.   I then re-installed "XFCE4 4.4.2.1 Metapackage" on my XO and rebooted.

At the log-in page, under "Options", both GNOME and XFCE presented themselves as options, and after I chose "XFCE", automagically XFCE proceeded to boot again!  

With  XFCE and GNOME UI's both installed, I have used up 1.93 GB on my SD card, or 70 MB more than with GNOME alone.

Exploring the Ubuntu repository again with Synaptic, I  note that there is a "KDE Core" metapackage...


 

[mavrothal]

Exploring the Ubuntu repository again with Synaptic, I  note that there is a "KDE Core" metapackage...

Tell us how it goes, though I would like to go the other way!

After 9 months with the XO and Sugar/Ubuntu I thought was time to try Ubuntu in my other machines and I should admit I was disappointed by the performance! It feels slower than OSX10.4 on a dual core G5 and OSX10.5 in an iMacIntel, a fresh install of XP PS2 on a Pentium 4 and only after the please-don’t-take-over-my-computer applications (antivirus, antispam, firewall, antiphishing), came to a balance. It was clearly better on my 4-years-without-formatting XP SP2 Pentium M laptop, but this one by now is really crowling… The sluggishness was true for boot and OS optimized application and was a tossup for other applications.
I came to realize that this is because Ubuntu is trying to be all things to all people, which is a good thing, but after having the “Instant on” experience of Puppy Linux, I thought that for > 90% of the time with the XO you may not need the extra baggage. Granted teapot’s installed is trimmed but I was wondering if further trimming can be done so services like samba or cups are not loaded (and probably many other of the 60+ idle processes)  as well as Locales in the applications (and other things that I do not know) unless you need them. It may take a bit more time when you need them but for the bulk of everyday use should be faster. 
Now teapot or some other knowledgeable person, may come up and say that I do not know what I’m talking about (and probably be right about the specifics). What I’m talking about thought is if there is a way to trim Ubuntu for the XO down (Puppy style) to the level that will be OK for web surfing, basic text editing, image and video viewing and music playing, and NOT be ready for other things that the user MAY need, but capable to load when needed?
If yes, where do we start? eg which web pages should I should be looking at?

[W8XR]

Teapot,

Just wanted to say "thanks!" for the 8.10 install for the XO - worked great!  I installed it on a 16GB SDHC and I'm really impressed.  It's been a while since I installed a Linux on anything and this was really a piece of cake.

Very nice, indeed.  Next - Intrepid on the Dell mini 12!

Mark

[jpjjr1961]

I am trying to install this on my XO.  I am a true novice, I've used Ubuntu (Heron) on my Dell but I didn't install it there, so installing Ubuntu on my XO is truly the first thing I've ever attempted.  Things seem to go along during the installation as they should but when I type in the "echo" command I get this:

bash: sfdsk/def/mmblk0: No such file or directory
bash:  echo: write error: Broken pipe

Any help or if folks could point me to where I could find help is appreciated.

[teapot]

I am trying to install this on my XO.  I am a true novice, I've used Ubuntu (Heron) on my Dell but I didn't install it there, so installing Ubuntu on my XO is truly the first thing I've ever attempted.  Things seem to go along during the installation as they should but when I type in the "echo" command I get this:

bash: sfdsk/def/mmblk0: No such file or directory
bash:  echo: write error: Broken pipe

Any help or if folks could point me to where I could find help is appreciated.

I am pretty sure, I didn't mention sfdsk/def/mmblk0 anywhere in my instructions.

It should be exactly like it is posted:
echo -e ',,L,*\n\n\n' | sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0

[teapot]

After 9 months with the XO and Sugar/Ubuntu I thought was time to try Ubuntu in my other machines and I should admit I was disappointed by the performance! It feels slower than OSX10.4 on a dual core G5 and OSX10.5 in an iMacIntel, a fresh install of XP PS2 on a Pentium 4 and only after the please-don’t-take-over-my-computer applications (antivirus, antispam, firewall, antiphishing), came to a balance. It was clearly better on my 4-years-without-formatting XP SP2 Pentium M laptop, but this one by now is really crowling… The sluggishness was true for boot and OS optimized application and was a tossup for other applications.

Default configuration of Ubuntu is often slow because of:

1. Graphics drivers. Not all graphics adapters have decent drivers. For example only recently ATI produced drivers that I was able to use with Compiz without tweaking on my other laptop -- and I still have to choose if I want 3D desktop (Compiz) or fast 3D graphics in programs running under it (I have to switch window manager to Metacity or Sawfish before running Second Life). Nvidia consistently provides decent drivers, however massive overuse of 3D resources with an old 64M card still can make them misbehave. Intel, though their graphics hardware is inferior to Nvidia, now provides very reliable and well-maintained drivers.

2. RAM. As opposed to Sugar, Gnome (and KDE, and Xfce) encourages running large number of applications, so it's very easy to reach the point when swapping significantly hinders the performance.

3. Some applications are massive pigs, and users have to be aware of this. For example, my home box has Athlon XP 3200+ and 1G of RAM -- an outdated but decent desktop computer. The problem is, I usually run Thunderbird with giant mailboxes and MythTV recording and playing TV. Thunderbird often takes a lot of RAM, and MythTV passes everything it recorded through a relatively CPU-intensive commercials detection filter, so the rest of things I run on that box see whatever RAM and CPU performance that is left after those two. Multiple cores can solve the MythTV problem, and more RAM would make Thunderbird look like less of a pig, however on a single core things often slow down to a crawl because of this. To be fair, a comparable PVR and a mail client would fare much worse on Windows -- without a huge amount of RAM to spend on disk buffers, they would cause massive disk I/O thrashing, what would exacerbate performance problems further.

At work I have two boxes, one is dual-core p4 with 1G, one single-core with 512M of RAM. 1G box is "development" (running Gentoo), 512M box is "Desktop/reference environment" (running Ubuntu). The configuration is approximately the same. At first I ran Thunderbird on a box with 512M, and it often did ridiculous things, like visibly slowing down when the cursor entered or exited Thunderbird window. Then I moved Thunderbird to "development" box while keeping it displayed on the "desktop" (X forwarded by ssh). The problem was instantly gone -- "development" box has more RAM, dual-core CPU and faster hard drive, so despite the massive amount of CPU time and RAM it used while compiling my code, there was always enough of both for Thunderbird. "Desktop" only had to support Firefox and evince (with all my documentation), so its 512M of RAM were sufficient for that purpose.

I came to realize that this is because Ubuntu is trying to be all things to all people, which is a good thing, but after having the “Instant on” experience of Puppy Linux, I thought that for > 90% of the time with the XO you may not need the extra baggage. Granted teapot’s installed is trimmed but I was wondering if further trimming can be done so services like samba or cups are not loaded (and probably many other of the 60+ idle processes)  as well as Locales in the applications (and other things that I do not know) unless you need them. It may take a bit more time when you need them but for the bulk of everyday use should be faster. 
Now teapot or some other knowledgeable person, may come up and say that I do not know what I’m talking about (and probably be right about the specifics). What I’m talking about thought is if there is a way to trim Ubuntu for the XO down (Puppy style) to the level that will be OK for web surfing, basic text editing, image and video viewing and music playing, and NOT be ready for other things that the user MAY need, but capable to load when needed?
If yes, where do we start? eg which web pages should I should be looking at?

Unused locale files and translated manual pages can be automatically removed by localepurge package. The problem is, changes made by localepurge are not integrated into package system, so there is no reliable way to revert the changes, other than collecting the list of missing files and reinstalling the packages they belong to.

When I trimmed down Ubuntu for XO, I used moocapiean's package list as the starting point for Hardy, and reduced it following the dependencies for Intrepid. One of the goals was to keep the update procedure from breaking, so I still had to follow the dependencies in Ubuntu packages even if they brought things that weren't necessary. Now, _running_ everything is a different matter -- some libraries and utilities are almost never used, locales files are mostly unused (unless people choose those languages -- for example, I use Russian language support). It's possible to disable cups by renaming its link and running it with "stop" argument:

sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S20cups /etc/rc2.d/K20cups
sudo /etc/rc2.d/K20cups stop

Obviously after doing that you will no longer be able to print without reversing this change.

Similar method works with other services (relevant directories are /etc/rcS.d and /etc/rc2.d -- XO uses SysV init instead of upstart used in regular Ubuntu, so only SysV-compatible directories are used). There isn't much that can be disabled there that is not already disabled (like samba), and things in rcS.d are mostly essential services/configuration steps that can't be removed without some carefully chosen replacements.

Some "processes" you see in ps output in brackets are kernel processes/threads -- they are parts of the kernel, and usually don't consume any resources by themselves. It is often helpful to look at ps xuw or press M (capital) in top to see memory usage per process. top shows separate columns for virtual memory (the address ranges the process covers -- that may be "true" size of the process when it is all in RAM but also may include things like video RAM, mapped files and other resources), resident segment size (how much of the process is in memory right now) and amount of shared memory (in this case it's mostly mapped libraries that are common between this and others processes). This may reveal some important details -- for example, Xfce components look large if you see only resident sizes, however "shared" column suggests that they all share 5-8M of libraries between themselves, what makes them much smaller than they seem.

More details can be found in /proc/<PID>/smaps

[I am FTW]

is there a special way to install this again on another SD or is it the same way?

[mavrothal]

So i was testing the the new Sugar 8.2.1 release candidate (which is OK by the way, but with no major changes other than firmware) and I thought to update Intrepid the old Hardy way to take advantage of the newer kernel. It went fine! No problems yet, power management works,  Updated Ubuntu with Synaptic, and everything else I tried looks OK. Didn't see any noticeable improvement either but I did not try much...
If you are interested you boot in the updated Sugar and in the terminal type

Code:

su
cd /media/OLPCRoot
rm -r boot/*.zip boot/vmlinuz boot/olpcrd.img boot/*-2.6.*.olpc* lib/modules/2.6*.olpc.* lib/firmware/*
cp -ia /boot/* boot/ < /dev/null
cp -a /lib/modules/* lib/modules/
cp -a /lib/firmware/* lib/firmware/
cd /home/olpc

Attention shoppers q2e32 firmware will brake the sound in Ubuntu (courtesy of XP compatibility I guess...) Flashing back to q2e18 (while keeping the update) reinstates the sound in Ubuntu

[teapot]

is there a special way to install this again on another SD or is it the same way?

You still have to format that card with ext3 filesystem.

You can dd the whole card image between SD card in SD slot and another SD card in USB SD adapter (under Sugar while both are unmounted), however most likely the process won't be any faster than a regular installation.

[teapot]

Attention shoppers q2e32 firmware will brake the sound in Ubuntu (courtesy of XP compatibility I guess...) Flashing back to q2e18 (while keeping the update) reinstates the sound in Ubuntu

Does it simply mute the sound, or is there some other visible effect (sound card disappears, device name changed, ALSA-based sound-using programs hang,...). Have you checked if this can be fixed by messing with switches in alsamixer?

[mavrothal]

Attention shoppers q2e32 firmware will brake the sound in Ubuntu (courtesy of XP compatibility I guess...) Flashing back to q2e18 (while keeping the update) reinstates the sound in Ubuntu

Does it simply mute the sound, or is there some other visible effect (sound card disappears, device name changed, ALSA-based sound-using programs hang,...). Have you checked if this can be fixed by messing with switches in alsamixer?

Control panel and alsamixer where the first I checked. No problem there. I do not know where was the problem and I do not know if you need both the new kernel/modules and the firmware to reproduce it or only the firmware is enough (though this should be simple to test-I just want to check the new kernel a bit more). In general with the q2e20+ firmwares I had multiple problems in Ubuntu. Usually touchpad recalibration failures (e24, 28, 30) a destroyed SD card (e28) and now this...

[why]

Teapot, I've been using XFCE 4.1 for a long time now, installed several applications and have generally been happy with this platform.  Tried to download the Xubuntu Intrepid several times but haven't been able to connect to the linked site, "site not found" or similar messages have been the outcome.   If you've got another link to the Denver site or another torrent location for the file please let me know, other than these comments thanks for the support!

[binaxo]

teapot, truly a great effort, a job very well done. i'm touching linux after 6yrs and had v little difficulty in installing in on a 8gb sd card. i had to work a bit to get the printer going (canon mp150) but glad got that solved now.

however, i am having extreme difficulty in getting my wireless network working. wired network through a usb-ethernet adapter works fine though. following some thread, i installed wicd manager (taking away nm) and i am still having difficulty in getting wireless (hidden ssid, wpa2 airport extreme) working through wext. i installed ndiswrapper but realized from one of ur posts that it makes no sense in installing ndiswrapper on xo (no that it worked on my system) and then removed it. when i try connecting to my ssid, it keeps saying connecting on wicd manager but never connects. i could get nm back, removing wicd, if that would be of any help. looking forward to get some help from you & others in setting the wireless on my xo ubuntu 8.10.

the second intriguing thing that is happening is that when i reboot xo, it intermittently would boot into xbuntu screen although i have set gnome as my default desktop. the next time i boot, it goes back to gnome. any reason why it may do so?

thank you v much.

[Rao]

I  deleted my post because I realized my error!

thanks,

Rao

[Nayantara]

It should be exactly like it is posted:
echo -e ',,L,*\n\n\n' | sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0

No problem with dd if=....
When I run the above (echo piped to sfdisk), I get this:

Code:

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: cannot get geometry
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 0 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
 /dev/mmcblk0: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found
New situation:
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 * 0 - 0 0 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/mmcblk0p3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/mmcblk0p4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
Warning: partition 1 has size 0 but is not marked Empty
Successfully wrote the new partition table

Re-reading the partition table ...
BKKRRPART: Inappropriate ioctl for device

If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/f007, say, then ....

Obviously when I try to run the mke2fs -jLOLPCRoot /dev/mmcbk0p1
I get:

Code:

Could not stat /dev/mmcblk0p1 - - - No such file or directory
The device apparently does not exists; did you specify it correctly?

I am using an Apacer 2GB Class-6 SD Card (not SDHC).
Also, mount | grep /dev/sd  before I started the process gave me this:
/dev/mmcbk0p1 on /media/APACER2GBSD type vfat (rw,nosuid,...)
Should I have used /dev/mmcbk0p1 in the erase parrtion and create partion steps instead of /dev/mmcblk0 ?

Any idea what I am doing wrong?