The XO Computer for Navigation

[phiggins]

Beausoleil,

Thanks I installed Jtides and it works very well under the XO operating system. Didn't try on Ubuntu.

Paul

[agkirk]

Paul, Could you supply one of your pithy instrtuction sets for installing java and jTides? Thanks in advance. I loaded wine and SeaClear_2 and that works well.

Alan

[phiggins]

OK here are the instructions I created for JTides. I found that it wasn't necessary to load Java as it was already there but I include the instructions in case it isn't on yours. You can test if Java is aready there by entering: java and see if it list all the options.

I used my PC to go the URLs mentioned and down loaded the install files to my SD card (KINGSTON) in a directory called Downloads then used this to install with.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Install Java: Linux manual download and installation instructions - 1.5.0, 6.0
su -
cd /home/olpc
/media/KINGSTON/Downloads/jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm.bin
rpm -iv jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm
--------------------------------------------------------
Install JTide: * JTides Home Page
Copy JTides from USB to home directory:
cd ~
cp /media/KINGSTON/Downloads/JTides.jar .
to execute:
java -jar ./JTides.jar
----------------------------------------------

Let me know if Java was on your system already please.

Paul

[drewc]

Paul, thanks for the tips on installing Jtides. Turns out I do not have Java on my OLPC so I followed your script for installing the Java RPM package. Alas I get the following error message when I run RPM: "...not an rpm package (pr package manifest)" Is there perhaps another trick to downloading the Java file that I might have missed? I am simply downloading to my Mac, copying to my SD, then following your script..

Drew

[agkirk]

Paul, I tried "java" at the terminal prompt and got "not a command". I looked around for java and found nothing so I suspect it isn't part of my XO SW package. I tried to use "rpm -iv jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm" in my SD Java folder and get Error open of "rpm -iv jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm"failed. File not found.
Do I need to do rpm in the home/olpc directory? I tried yum install java with no luck.

[phiggins]

Did you both do this step:

/media/KINGSTON/Downloads/jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm.bin

In other words while in your home directory execute the binary file that is on your SD card. This will unpack itself and become an jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm in your home directory. I think I missed that the first time I tried it too.

And the last step should be:
su
rpm -iv /home/olpc/jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm

After its unpacked I did the next step rpm -iv jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm and it said the rpm java was already installed. It probably was installed already because I installed mariner which has java as part of it.

Paul

[agkirk]

Paul Got it! I believe we need to be in the su shell to do the binary extract, or at least that is the way I got it to work. Now in my /home/olpc/ directory I have Activities; Mariner; and jre-6u3-linux-i586.... I think I would like to remove the Mariner activity since SeaClear seems to work for me, any suggestions? I also go the package jre-1.6.0_03-fcs is already installed"" msg, but now the java command works. Something in the install process activates "JAVA". I'm off to run jTides. Thanks for the help. I'll report my success.

Alan

[agkirk]

Paul jTides is running. Your original instructions are spot-on, even the the directions to be in su for the binary extract. I ran java -jar jTides on my SD and that seems to work. I did not move jTides to my home directory thinking I would conserve the small amount of remaining XO FLASH for later. Am I really doing that if I execute the jar out of the SD card?

Thanks again

Alan

[Beausoleil]

Paul,

Since the XO's operating system is based on Red Hat, is yum not part of the base package? If so, then installing java would be a simple "sudo yum install jre" from the command line - or from the applications menu if Sugar has such a thing (assuming you have network connectivity). You might have to setup a repository other than the standard defaults, but it certainly would simplify things.

Man - I could kick myself for missing out on the G1G1 program!

[phiggins]

Alan,
Glad to hear you got Jtides working. As for removing Mariner, because the install command for it is:

gzip -dc SetupMariner-Linux-3_1_1.tar.gz | (cd /home/olpc; tar xvf -)

I think all you have to do is delete the Mariner directory:
cd ~
rm -rf Mariner

but maybe someone who knows Linux better than me like Beausoleil can comment on that or suggest another way.

Yes I guess running Jtides from the SD card or a USB memory stick will save you some space. As I said before, every now and then I clean up everything by restoring the operting system to the flash drive from a USB card. That drops the usage to 32%. Then I reinstall everything I really need which so far is Wine, SeaClear and JTides and because I'm still helping the Navgator people to find the bug in Mariner, I put it back too. So I have a list of how to restore everything.

Beausoleil,

I tried the: yum install jre and I guess it would have worked but because I already have java installed it gets:

Requested dep: jre is provided by installed package

Which I assume is mariner.

BTW they are selling the XO computer on ebay.

Paul

[drewc]

Paul, got my JTides up and running and, except for a few quirks in their UI (where on the main page do they show the important things like what day you are looking at!) it's working great. An additional item we should probably look into is how to create some new XO activities (icons) for our new tools such that we don't have to resort to command line strings every time we'd like to launch JTides, SeaClear, Mariner etc., and how to get a Bluetooth stack working so that we can use many of the popular Bluetooth GPS out there with our XO laptops. Thanks again for your help!

Drew

[phiggins]

Drew,
Yes those are two things I was thinking about too. How to get an activity icon and bluetooth.

I tried getting Bluetooth working for quite awhile with no luck. I've come to the conclusion that Bluetooth support has to be genned/compiled when they create the linux kernel and I don't think it was included in the XO to conserve space but I'm not sure.

I found this document:
How to setup Bluetooth - ThinkWiki

and in it it says:
Enable Bluetooth subsystem and drivers:
Networking → <*>Bluetooth subsystem support (CONFIG_BT) and I think this is missing. If any of the Linux experts out there know if there is a command or something to check if this has been done, please let me know.

Regarding Jtides day. It uses whatever date/time your computer is using or you can change it in the preferences. Just make sure your computer has the right date and time.

One other program I tried was ShipPlotter running under Wine but wasn't able to get it working.

Paul

[phiggins]

Well I found the answer to my question whether Bluetooth is installed or not. It isn't, if you look at config-2.6.22-......... file in /boot it lists all the configuration parameters to build the kernel and CONFIG_BT is commented out. So until someone rebuilds the kernel with bluetooth support we are out of luck.
Paul

[phiggins]

I've discovered a way to add an activity icon for the 3 programs SeaClear, MapCal and Jtides. Here's how to do it:
Go to
Activity tutorial - OLPC
Here you can learn all about Activities. To reduce the amount of typing, click on the "download a completed .xo package" and save the HelloWorld-1.xo.zip file on your PC (Sorry Mac users you'll have to substitute the proper commands). For the following steps I am assuming you have either an SD card or US memory stick inserted on your PC. For mine its in the 'e:' drive and has a volume label of KINGSTON , substitute your drive letter and volume name in the instructions below.
To create Activity for SeaClear:
1. Open the HelloWorld-1.xo.zip and extract it to 'e:\'
2. Open a CMD Prompt window and issue the following commands:
- rename e:\HelloWorld.activity SeaClear.activity
- rename e:\SeaClear.activity\HelloWorldActivity.py SeaClearActivity.py
- rename e:\SeaClear.activity\activity\activity-helloworld.svg activity-seaclear.svg
3. Edit e:\SeaClear.activity\SeaClearActivity.py and do following:
a.- change all occurrances of 'HelloWorld' to 'SeaClear' (s/b only 1)
b. - change all occurrances of 'Hello World' to 'SeaClear' (s/b 4 of them )
c. - change the 'import sys, os' to 'import sys, os, threading'
d. - add after the 'class SeaClearActivity(activity.Activity):' these 3 statements:
def StartApp(self):
os.system('wine "C:\Program Files\SeaClear\SeaClear_2.exe" ')
(blank line)
e. - add after the 'self.button.show()' these 2 statements:
thread1 = threading.Thread(target=self.StartApp)
thread1.start()
4. Edit e:\SeaClear.activity\MANIFEST and change HelloWorldActivity.py to SeaClearActivity.py
5.Edit e:\SeaClear.activity\activity\activity.info and change all occurrances of 'HelloWorld' to 'SeaClear'. Note: the 'icon = activity-helloworld' should be changed to 'icon = activity-seaclear' ie: s/b lowercase.
6. Repeat steps 1 to 5 but substitute 'MapCal' for 'SeaClear' 2nd line of step 3.d:
os.system('wine "C:\Program Files\SeaClear\MapCal_2.exe" ')
7. Repeat steps 1 to 5 but substitute 'JTides' for 'SeaClear' 2nd line step 3.d.:
os.system('java -jar /home/olpc/JTides.jar')
8. Transfer your SD/USB stick to the XO computer and open a terminal activity and enter:
- su
- cd /usr/share/activities
- cp -r /media/KINGSTON/SeaClear.activity/ . (note blank after last /)
- cp -r /media/KINGSTON/MapCal.activity/ .
- cp -r /media/KINGSTON/JTides.activity/ .
For some reason when I transfer to the XO, the 'MANIFEST' file becomes 'manifest'
the following will rename it back to uppercase:
- mv SeaClear.activity/manifest SeaClear.activity/MANIFEST
- mv MapCal.activity/manifest MapCal.activity/MANIFEST
- mv JTides.activity/manifest JTides.activity/MANIFEST
- reboot
9. After restarting you should see 3 new icons in the Sugar frame. If you pass the mouse over them they will say 'JTides' 'MapCal' and 'SeaClear'. Maybe later I will enhance the icons to something prettier.

Click on each icon and see that it brings up the corresponding application (note: be patient it takes awhile). You'll notice that it doesn't bring up the application in the icon activities ring but instead creates a seperate thread which appears as ball in the activities ring. If you like you can terminate the square box activity after the application starts.

If for some reason it just sits there with the icon square blinking in the ring, then reboot and check all your coding. If you are really stuck, let me know your email address and I will send you the three activities in zip format but you'll still have to perform from step 8 above.

[phiggins]

After going through what I did in the previous post, I began to think they must have pretty smart kids in Africa if they have to go though that everytime they install a new activity. Well turns out there is a lot easier way.

I have attached 3 activity files to this note that install the icons for the JTides, MapCal and SeaClear. Because this site doesn't allow attachments with a type of .xo type, I added .doc to the file names. Download them by right clicking on each of them and then click Save Target as . After downloading them just rename them removing the .doc suffix. Then put them on an SD card and move it to the XO.

The way you should install a new activity is to open the Browse activity, fill in url which will be something like: /media/KINGSTON/SeaClear-1.xo then press Enter. It will download the file. Then go to the Journal select the file and click Resume. The activity will be installed automatically.

Remember these actiities only create icons for the 3 applications that allow you o start them without typing a lot of stuff in a terminal window. You must have alreay installed Jtides, MapCal and SeaClear as explained in previous posts.

Paul