The XO Computer for Navigation

[agkirk]

Paul, The problem was as you described in the PM, I was in the XO su mode. It was something simple. I did

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
unlink com1
ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1

in the regular terminal mode, as you suggested and now SeaClear is fully functional, well except for that sound problem.

Thanks

[phiggins]

Alan,

Good thought it might be that. Were you able to run the new simulator OK?

Paul

[paulclan]

this is a great thread guys keep posting! I feel that the more of us get to grips with linux based OS the further our € or $ will go! Paul Elliott has splurged for an Asus eee which is about a 7" screen laptop running a linux OS. If these can be got to navigate this will be brilliant as humping around a laptop is a bit old fashioned now. I have a Nokia 770 which runs on debian flavoured linux and has opened up the mysterious world of tarballs and .gz and repositorys (sounds rude!). As a newbie to linux it has really opened my eyes as to how much extra code is in Windows, and how much quicker UBUNTU for example will boot up a machine. Lastly, well for now anyway, VM ware fusion has made my iMac cover the spots I still need for fax etc by running xp from within the iMac at really stunning speeds. All a learning curve for the retirement!
Keep this thread going!

[Maren]

Originally Posted by agkirk

If this thread goes away, I'm in blue water. I had to go back to page 5 and refresh my memory on how to install an activity. Sure glad you are doing such a great job on the install instructions.

Paul, Alan

This is a quite interesting thread; all the more since the two XOs I ordered arrived at the house today. I, however, am on the other side of the planet. Maybe they'll get frequent flier miles.

Paul: You are a wizard.

Alan: I am not too sure if you meant you would be as if lost at sea or if you were referencing a port-a-john. Either way, I think you speak for a lot of us.

[phiggins]

Good to hear from you guys and I apologize to the others who have made nice comments without any response. I've been wrapped up getting this simulator working. I think its worth it to see if there any bugs in these programs before I get out in the middle of the gulf stream.

Just tried the simulator on ShipPlotter and found a script for the english channel that works after a few bugs in the simulator were fixed. After seeing the traffic in the channel, I can see why you English/Europeans like AIS so much. Unfortunately can't get ShipPlotter working on Linux.

I 've been running the XO on Ubuntu for awhile now and I'm really getting to like it. Much nicer to use than Sugar. I only have it running on a 1G SD card and I ran out storage on it the other day. Had to delete a lot old stuff like Python 2.3 and 2.4. Guess I'll splurge for a bigger SD and go through the pain of building Ubuntu on it. Took me quite awhile to figure it out last time.

Paul

[Kerry]

Paul,
I have been looking at this 8gb SDHC class 6 card from Amazon for $33 with free shipping:
Amazon.com: Transcend 8GB SDHC CARD (SD 2.0 SPD Class 6): Electronics
what do you think?
Did you use one of the OLPCNews threads to guide your installation of Ubuntu? which one? anything to add to their thoughts?
Finally, a quick summary of your XO peripherals, and Apps would be very helpful when you have the time. I appreciate the pioneering you have done, and I feel you have overcome enough of the obstacles for me to overcome my hackophobia and jump in. Many, many, many thanks for your pioneering!
Kerry

[Kerry]

The Transcend class 6 8gb sdhc card had this in a review on newegg:
High speed, low price

Pros: Works perfectly with my new laptop, works via a USB adapter on my old laptop. Even with the adapter, it's still faster than any of my USB drives.

Cons: It's spoiled me -- I'm ordering the 16GB version to supplement my new laptop's internal flash drive, and demoting this one to use with an adapter to permanently replace my USB drive.

Other Thoughts: 100% compatible with the OLPC XO.
....................
That's all I need. Install new sd card, install Ubuntu, follow GDAY II, through this tricky passage.
Kerry

[phiggins]

Kerry,
Boy what a deal on those SD cards. Sounds OK to me but what do I know about SD cards. Here in Canada those cards are twice that price.

To install Ubuntu I followed: OLPC News Forum: Installing Ubuntu using a disk image I see they now recommended at least 1.5G SD card. No wonder mine ran out of storage.

You'll need a developers key which the above instructions point you where and how to get it. You should apply for it now.

The reason those instructions are a little confusing is they assume you are loading the SD card from a computer other than an XO then moving the card to the XO. I did it from the XO and its slightly different and I had to repeat it half a dozen times before I got it to work. I should have documented it but didn't. If I try it again, I'll write it down.

As for perhiperals on the XO, I just have a mouse connected directly to the USB port, I believe every mouse I tried worked including wireless ones. I also connect my GPS using a serial USB to serial port. I have 3 of those that all work on my PC under XP but only two work on the XO. I believe one that works is a Dynex. I tried a few other things like a 250G external hard drive via USB and it also worked as did two different DVD drives.

For software, running under Sugar I've settled on Opera for the web browser. I installed Wine 09.55 to run Seaclear for the navigation program. I installed Java to run Jtides for a tide program.

To get the latest release of wine I had to modify the yum repros so it would get it from the Fedora repros instead of the olpc-koji repros which only had version Wine version 09.47 .

Other then Seafarer I haven't installed anything on Ubuntu but it needed quite a few dependencies. Check out the other thread for details: http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...tml#post145027

Paul

[agkirk]

All

I have been using the Transcend 8GB Class 6 card for about 6 weeks in my XO and had no problems. I recommend it, especially at $33.

Alan

[Maren]

Originally Posted by Kerry

Paul,
I have been looking at this 8gb SDHC class 6 card from Amazon for $33 with free shipping:
Amazon.com: Transcend 8GB SDHC CARD (SD 2.0 SPD Class 6): Electronics
what do you think?
Did you use one of the OLPCNews threads to guide your installation of Ubuntu? which one? anything to add to their thoughts?
Finally, a quick summary of your XO peripherals, and Apps would be very helpful when you have the time. I appreciate the pioneering you have done, and I feel you have overcome enough of the obstacles for me to overcome my hackophobia and jump in. Many, many, many thanks for your pioneering!

The effort Paul is putting forth is, so far as I can tell, unique. However there are a large number of people doing things with peripherals, other flavors of Linux, etc. So it might be of greater benefit for all to look at those sites first for general questions.

So, to get you started, here are a few links:

Guide for Users
OLPC Forum - good place to start
OLPC learning club/user groups
Memory Cards
OLPC Wiki
Setting up VOIP on an XO
List of activities (i.e., programs) for the XO (some are under development)
Dissection of an XO

[phiggins]

Thought I posted this already, mabe it was on another thread, but I got myself a 4Gig SDHC card at Best Buy for $44 (and it was on sale). I reinstalled Ubuntu using the compressed file method which worked fine after I learned how to spell the unmount command: "umount".

Under Ubuntu I have since installed wine 09.59 and SeaClear and also SeaFarer. All works well except having a problem with Seafarer which gets a segmentation fault when I send it an AIS senetence. I am working with Patrick at Barco to resolve it. SeaClear still has the no sound problem.

I think I'll stick with Ubuntu rather than Sugar. Ubuntu is so much easier to work with. Just the capability to do Cut and Paste rather than typing in those long commands, makes it worth using. I would recommend anyone thinking of using the XO seriously to go to a real Linux system like Ubuntu.

Paul

[Efraim]

Originally Posted by phiggins

Thought I posted this already, mabe it was on another thread, but I got myself a 4Gig SDHC card at Best Buy for $44 (and it was on sale).

I see you're in Toronto. Do yourself a favour and shop for computer parts here Canada Computers. An 8GB SDHC can be had for $34.49.

As a full time Linux user, I've been following this thread with interest, good work.

Cheers

[phiggins]

OK thanks Efraim. I'll give them a try next time.

[tyrntlzrdking]

Originally Posted by phiggins

I decided to try out Opera as a browser and discovered they create an icon for it similiar to way I'm doing it for SeacLear etc. But I looked at the code they use and its a lot simpler than mine so it brings up the application a little faster. So I have updated my Activities once more using their method. Let me know if you want me to post them.

Paul, I downloaded Opera into my XO and created an icon using the following commands:
cd /usr/share/activities
wget http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/olpc/opera-activity.tar.gz
tar xvzf opera-activity.tar.gz

Only problem is after I click on the icon and it opens up in my center circle, another grey circle/icon opens up next to it. I then need to use the grey circle to open and close Opera.
Do you still have this small problem using whatever method you used above? Thanks.

[phiggins]

tyrntlzrdking

Yes unfortunately Opera and the activitities I created for SeaClear, JTides, etc are not real activities that open the activity. They just launch the program in another shell. Its just better than having to open a terminal window and type in the command to launch the program. If the programs , Opera, SeaClear etc were wrote in Python they probably could be modified to become real activities and be be launched like the other activities.

Paul