OLPC(s) Will Go

I'd rather cash in on the $400 potential dollars than keep these cutting edge icons of Nincompoop's inefficacy in my living room. Here's a guy who seems to know what to do about the passwords (really, any decent linux guy - i.e., not me - would probably know)

http://thoughtsbyclayg.blogspot.com/2008/09/olpc-default-no-password.html

Where There's a Will

There's a way to rig up your computer so that, when you get an email from a certain address to your gmail account, it sounds a bell. How?

Better CDE

Being able to iconize open windows onto the desktop or an icon manager - or if so chosen, onto the taskbar is a key component of productivity. Currently, X-windows CDE supports the first two and M$ Windows supports the last one. There's some software available commercially that can provide a "workspace" functionality for M$ Windows - but as it's not open-source, I don't trust it - but, it's probably worthwhile.

Now, for those who have to sink so low as to use CDE on a regular basis, they might be aware of the dtwmrc file that can be customized to provided user-specific key bindings.

Here are some defaults that you'll see in your ~/.dt/C or ~/.dt/ dtwmrc file:

Alt window f.minimize

Now, here's what I'd like to see: Where is the f.minimize defined? And, is there a way to add f.desired functions? For example, I'd like CTRL-ALT-Btn1 to reduce a window's x-size by half, and ALT-SHIFT-Btn1 to reduce it in half vertically. How?

OLPC Teardown

http://www.planetanalog.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XBYJSUFEJASUUQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=208401731

XO Open Firmware Prompt

To get to the open firmware prompt you press the X in the upper left hand corner of the keyboard immediately after booting the OLPC. Really? What does immediately mean?

1)Type "4c000014" and press
2)Type "rdmsr" and press
3)Type "u." and press (a hex number will be displayed)
4)Again, type "u." and press (a second hex number will be displayed, write it down)

According to

More XO

Saw something online that said - XO overclocked, so I dusted this crappy piece of equipment. Will make one last ditch effort before trashing it....

first, it runs around me trying to connect to the wireless network. I have to fish out my old post that says use HEX and Open Access for putting in the SSID. Then, I have to get into the router to see what's going on - and the DLink won't let me in - I wonder if I've forgotten the username - but online I find admin is correct - but, this is new - you can use "user" and leave password blank to enjoy in read-only mode. That works.

Back to the XO - you're tired of using that tiny screen - I remember my post that tells me how to get in using cygwin. That works - except, I'm root. I'd rather get in as olpc. Only, it doesn't take my password when I try SSH -X olpc@192.168.0.101 . So, I find something online that says how to be root and change the password - use "passwd username".

Now, as you might know, one of my goals to accomplish before I abandon computers completely is to reach a level of competence with linux and perl where I can quickly leverage the work done by others - use their packages and modules. That's where I'm going with trying to hack this XO thing.

There actually seems to be some worthwhile reading on the OLPC forum:

OLPC Hacks: XO Laptop Spy Camera or Motion DetectorOLPC Help: How to Install Ubuntu on the XO Laptop!
OLPC Help: Replacing the XO Laptop Keyboard
XO Accessories: XO Camera Two Mirror Periscope

The Motion Detection guy uses python to capture and filter images and uses motion detection setting posted by this guy. If it works, this is awesome - why - because, once it's done on the OLPC, it can be easily done on the ASUS thing - and that's something that you buy from a company - as in, it's guaranteed to work - so, now, you're giving people a configurable home security device. This could change the future of crime in a big way. I'm really excited about this.

Resolved! Special Mention Saurabh Jang (MOT)

The problem was that dtwm was always looking at my ~/.dt/C/dtwmrc and I was always editing my ~/.dt/dtwmrc. I saw on some page on the net by the man whose is the word of honour on this page that dtwm looks at ~/.dt/C/dtwmrc before it looks at (if at all) the ~/.dt/dtwmrc and that was what clinched it.

Thanks Theresa, thanks Kannan, thanks Sun.... for nothing.

Wuenschlist CDE WM

Okay, in Solaris-CDE - you can double-click on the titlebar of a window and it will be maximized. Question is, is it possible to tell the window manager that there are really two monitors and that you only want the window to occupy one screen when maximized? Or, can you control what the Maximize function will do? Can you tell it to only increase the window geometry to 1280x1024? That would help my productivity a lot.

Hier'st what goes on:

CDE through Citrix - crappy windows management ->
Exceed - Cadence hangs after the property form ->
Seamless windowing through Citrix -> crappy windows management ->
back to Citrix -> doesn't give me good pointer precision when I use the wireless mouse ->
back to a cheap wired optical mouse - which is so cheap that it sometimes sends double clicks ->
I'm still out of the psych ward. But for how long. I should probably sue M$ and Hummingbird and Sun and Novell for damages. What a set of *ds. Can't they get basic technology like this to be user friendly? Or are they serving a different set of masters than we think - all being paid by the Japs and Chinese to keep America's productivity down?

Configuring CDE

If you haven't figured it by now, yes, I've given up on the XO laptop completely. I don't even _look_ at it anymore unless I'm searching for something that might be under it. I've got two left. If you need them, please just ask.

Anyhow, now my predicament is that Solaris-CDE doesn't respond when I try to do stuff like:

AltTab root|icon|window f.next_workspace

It retains the old definition of the Alt-Tab combo which is f.next_key. Why is Solaris out to get me now? I have to give it to CDE - it's one of the crappiest window managers ever created. You now know why Sun's stock never recovered. Khosla probably wrote the code for this.

Mathemagica

Stuff I didn't know you could do. This is what happens when you have so many smart people looking at something.

Mathematica puts out a symbolic expression that you can read. Now, you think about publishing that - using LaTex. Luckily for you, all you have to do is:

In[3]:= TeXForm[%]

Combine that with Tex's fault tolerance and you have a big time-saver here.

Another thing I didn't know you could do - but, being a shell guy I thought I'd try:

The % in the above refers to the output of the previous submission. But, can you refer to the nth output? Sure can, just use %n. That's a handy one too. Good job Steve.

Build Your Own Blackberry

With some help from my outfit:

http://beagleboard.org

HOWTO No Extra Cost Dual Monitor Setup

if you have a Dell docking station and a Dell laptop.

Use Fn-F8 to go to dual monitor mode - this is trivial - but this isn't what most people want because the laptop screen is so small and so high-res that 1400x1050 is very hard on the eyes. You want to connect two external LCD monitors to your docking station and then get 2560x1024 using the two of them:

1) Connect one monitor to the VGA connector, the other to the DVI connector
2) Use Fn-F8 to go to dual monitor mode - only one LCD will be used and the laptop screen will be used as the second display
3) Close the laptop. The system will go into standby mode and the displays will go blank.
4) Press the power button on the DOCKING STATION. There are two buttons that the rest of the world has never noticed since the last ice age.
5) The system will now use both monitors.

Wish I had got this with my Google search "how to do dual monitor using a docking station VGA DVI". But I didn't.

Linux and NTFS

Apparently, the battle has been won. But, the war - not yet. We need a way to take Windows apart piece by piece - be able to look at it as components and see how they can be used so we can decide what to keep and what to throw away and what to modify/replace. That's the holy grail. It'll take another Torvalds to pull that off - this time from Brazil.

Anyhow, a simple search throws up ntfscat, libntfs, ntfsresize.

Where linux failed - in making it's stuff easy to use. The problem is that though the majority of people in a company don't need hardcore computing - they would faint if they looked at a linux screen. This should be a simpler problem to solve, but you know how computer scientists are - it's not appealing enough to go after.

HOWTO Migrate Programs Between Win Installations?

So you had your favourite programs on one hard drive that seems to be going bad. Is there a way to salvage them onto a new Win installation?

HOWTO Prevent a Corrupt Program from Starting

automatically and holding WinXP hostage. If you know, please tell me.

Es gebt manche helpfulle suggestions hier :

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

HOWTO Use Cygwin to Record Radio Shows Onto Your PC

If you know how, tell me and get a link on my blog to your site. I tried a search for "use cygwin to record radio shows onto your computer" with dogpile and got some frontier gibberish.

Windows is so unfriendly you can't do a damn thing without buying something from someone to do it - or accepting malware.

I have a DSL connection that lets me listen to radio through the internet and I want to record 1 hour of KERA.org every Saturday starting 11 AM (for example).

Answers :

If you mean online radio, then the tool is StreamRipper http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/ It's open source and multi-platform including Windows.

HOWTO Control Devices with the Serial Port and GUIs

One of the best and most concise pages you'll ever find:

http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J4?view_all=1

I'll probably use perl, but that's just me.

PC - windows - cygwin - gcc - Tcl/Tk

doesn't have to be a PC surely - linux ought to work. Except, then you have to be a guru to even get on the internet.

HOWTO Get a Perl Tk Widget to Behave

All my other X-Windows behave okay on my multiple monitor system - if you do the double-click on the title bar, they'll only take up one monitor. Not the hello world widget I get with this :

use Tk;
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->title("Hello World");
$mw->Button("-text" => "Done", -command => sub { exit })->pack;
MainLoop;

Anyone know what's missing?

The World's Greatest Hacker

What makes a great hacker - the ability to takes someone else's work, find out what modules it has, and then use those modules to create something you want - or an extension of the original work. Here's an example :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZjEy7-QCo

Das ist Moeglisch

With a linux guru's help:

use about:config in the browser to get some possibly useful info.

Install nmap on your other PC to find out stuff about your XO.

ps -u olpc
will give you some useful information as well.

We found that su directly gives you root access. They should atleast ship it out with the default password being something you picked at payment time or something.

> yum
can do stuff for you - Yet another Update Manager

> yum check-update

To reboot, you can do
> reboot

During reboot, you can try CTRL-ALT-F11 or CTRL-ALT-F12 to look at the boot sequence. We found all of CTRL-ALT-F1 to F4 give you something useful.

Even though we upgraded the kernel, it was still booting with the old kernel.

I had put a password on the olpc account that I'd forgotten, but as the root account didn't have a password, I could use the SSH client on my PC to get into the XO. Use the router to find out what IP address has been assigned it - my case was 192.168.0.101. Username root, port 22.

They do have a remote desktop client available. nxclient or etwas.

But, what I did, that I hadn't read about was use my cygwin install to do

> ssh -X root@162.198.0.101

and then, I could launch an xterm, and, the best part - CTRL-rightclick gave me the large font - and I could get the xterm to take up the whole screen. Thus, we have gotten past the tiny screen. One small step fur mich. Eine giant leap fur mankind.

Cornucopia

This dude looks in so much pain from being a geek.

http://www.geek.com/feature-hacking-the-xo-laptop

Redeeming Features

Okay, managed (plug-n-play) to get a regular USB keyboard connected - looks like my USB/PS2 adapter might have a problem. I wouldn't expect the XO to mess that up. Keyboard is the Mi Internet Elite keyboard from WM for $20. Will look online for a cheaper one.

Then, managed to do an "xterm &" and get a new xterm with microscopic font. So, atleast I did manage to launch an application from the command line. Not sure if it's possible to get full-fledged windowing - resize windows, etc. That's not so important. Next order of business is to hack in and increase the processor speed at the expense of more power of course. If someone tells me how to do that, I'll pay!

Aus der meister :

Can you get access to this directory: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/
If you do, cat these files - scaling_available_frequencies, scaling_available_governors, etc. - to see what's available.
If the application cpufreq is available, you can alter these settings.

Unfortunately, cpu0 only contains a file called crash_notes and a directory called cache. Looks like I'll have to import cpufreq from somewhere else.

But, I can confess that the beast feels an order or magnitude faster just from being able to use a regular keyboard.

XO Recalibrating Touchpad

Hope this helps someone:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Recalibrating_Touchpad

Evidence

of people actually having success with a USB mouse on the XO. Unfortunately, they don't post linx to instructions.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/review-olpc-xo.html