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[chombee]

I bought one of the XtraOrdinary SD cards from on-disk.com, been using it a couple of days. Overall my impression is that this is pretty disappointing compared to the freely available DebXO on which XtraOrdinary is based. It's nice to have a fast SD card though, I might just wipe it and install stock DebXO on it, perhaps after imaging it so I can restore XtraOrdinary if I want to, as I don't think on-disk provide images for download.

I'm disappointed with XtraOrdinary because:

*   Skype doesn't work, even though they claim it does. Being able to do video calls with the XOs built-in cam and mic as on-disk's site claims you can was the main reason I bought it. You can launch it and start a test call, but there's no audio either sent or received. Once I fixed the audio settings in skype and the OS-level mixer settings (all of the settings were wrong) I did get audio, but both the audio sent and received is pretty garbled and the voice recording was very quiet, I couldn't get the mic to be sensitive enough, it sounds to me like the XO is not fast enough to handle Skype's on-the-fly encoding/compression and decoding/decompression of the audio. You get the same effect if you use the simple gnome voice recorder app in DebXO if it's set to record to a compressed format such as ogg or mp3, but if you set it to record to uncompressed wav than the sound comes through clear. As far as I can tell this Skype situation is exactly what you'd get if you installed DebXO then installed Skype using the debian package from their website. The XO-1 ofcourse doesn't come anywhere near meeting the minimum hardware requirements given on Skype's website.

There are lots of little issues with XtraOrdinary that do not occur in DebXO. I don't know how they've managed to introduce them all. For example:

*   All terminal applications (I tried lxterm, xterm and terminator) start up with / as the current working directory, not the user's home directory as they should. This is really annoying and I've no idea what to do about it.
*   My favourite terminal application terminator ignores its config file.
*   I edited the openbox config file to add some keyboard shortcuts, and the next time I logged in the config file got overwritten with the default one again! The file is normally called rc.xml, but on dexbo it's for some reason called lxde-rc.xml. This seems to be an LXDE thing. Irritating.
*   My email application, mutt, fails to send mails using my mail provider's SMTP server, it prints an error.
*   The power management just blanks the screen, it doesn't even turn off the backlight.
*   You can adjust the display brightness using the XO's special keys for it but not the volume using the volume keys that are right next to the brightness keys!
*   Iceweasel/Firefox is not a very good choice of browser for the XO. It uses too much system resources, and can barely run on the XO. I'm not sure which browser would work best, combining usability/usefulness with low use of system resources. Gnome's Epiphany might be better, or perhaps Midori, Dillo or NetSurf, etc.
*   Not that I use office software anyway but I'm quite surprised that the full OpenOffice.org suite is installed. I haven't tried it, but OO is a notoriously power-hungry application, if Iceweasel can barely run on the XO I seriously doubt that OpenOffice is a good idea. Abiword (which is also installed) and other Gnome Office apps (Gnumeric) probably make better sense as they use less system resources.

I could go on. None of these issues occurred when I was using the stock DebXO with Gnome desktop environment. Aside from Skype, the main reason I wanted to pay for XtraOrdinary was to have an OS on the XO with everything setup for me so I wouldn't have to sort it all out myself. However it seems I will have to invest a significant amount of time to figure out how to fix all of these little issues with XtraOrdinary. So much that I may be better off simply wiping it and sticking good old DebXO on.

I found that DebXO's Gnome version works very well. Gnome, not known as a lightweight desktop, run surprisingly well on the XO, but if you want something lighter you can simply install openbox (the window manager that LXDE uses) on top of the DebXO Gnome distribution and us that instead. Use gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-power-manager within openbox and you'll get the themes and fonts looking right and the power management working. Use the program docker and you'll get a Gnome and KDE compatible system tray/notification area in Openbox's dock. You can then edit the Openbox config files and use openbox's menus and keyboard shortcuts to control things. You can use Conky or a panel application to display information such as the time and date and the battery life. etc. etc. It would take a certain amount of time to set this up yourself but possibly no longer than it would take to fix problems with XtraOrdinary, and from my experience it would work better once done.

For now I'm sticking with XtraOrdinary, giving it a chance, but so far it seems inferior to DebXO.

[Keith]

Chombee,
Thank you for your comments.  Just today I am coming back to XO world after a number of months away.  I was excited to see the "Xtra Ordinary" solution and still have some questions and your post actually is answering some.  I still am not convinced I am willing to part w/ $40 (and yes $40 is a big deal to me).  I think I will look up your referenced DebXO build for another starting place.  Please keep us posted as you continue to work with it.
Cheers,
KJ

[Peter_Pan_ic]

Chombee - What were the adjustments you used to get skype to work? Unfortunately I found your review after ordering, and also need skype ASAP.  Ty.