[Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Sebastian,

Sorry for reviving the old thread.

On 2 Jul 2009, at 23:33, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:

> S Page wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Martin Dengler<martin at martindengler.com 
>> >  wrote:
>>> I'd suggest you ask sdz to make the .iso that he used to create the
>>> .img file.
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:37 AM, Sebastian Dziallas<sebastian at when.com 
>> >  wrote:
>>> I'm very pleased to announce the first early preview of a new  
>>> generation
>>> of SoaS XO-1 images.
>> Sir, could you upload the .iso for this image somewhere, maybe in a
>> subdirectory of http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/ ?
>
> Heh. Well, yeah, I usually would. But I don't have the .iso files  
> around right now, so that we'd need to rebuild this. In the  
> meantime, Martin Dengler has done some great work to incorporate  
> more cool new stuff for the XO-1 into SoaS builds and I'd think  
> there's a new build coming up soonish... ;)

FWIW: My best success so far for an F11/0.84 Sugar install on an XO-1  
has been with your June 16th image:

	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.crc
	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.img

It did need some tweaking clean-up that I though might be useful for  
the record, even if there's a better solution to getting F11/0.84 on  
an XO-1:

1) Minor bump I think you mentioned when announcing devxo-1.img were  
some build issues that put most pre-installed Activities in the wrong  
places. Usually the first thing I do with any of these non-OLPC distro  
build is get all the Activities moved over to ~/Activities; get rid of  
any symbolic links there; and make sure all the file owners are set  
correctly for the default user so that Sugar can upgrade/erase/install  
Activities from its GUI as expected.

2) Tiny, tiny fonts, are quite a usability issue :-) Took me ages to  
track this one down, lots' of dead ends. Slim correctly has its dpi  
over-ride commented out:

	grep dpi /etc/slim.conf
	#xserver_arguments	-dpi 75

... and X is correctly getting the display information:

	xdplyinfo | egrep 'resolution|dimensions'
	dimensions:	1200x900 pixels (152x114 millimeters)
	resolution:	201x201 dots per inch

... and $SUGAR_SCALING is correct (set by ~/.Xclients):

	echo $SUGAR_SCALING
	100

Solution/hack in the end was to futz with the /etc/X11/Xresources and  
modify the Xft.dpi to be 150 to get all the text back to sugary  
readable goodness! Hey I can even play nethack again ;-)

NOTE: We may want to expose a similar control as a CP usability option  
for those who are partially blind or with poor eyesight (the Sugar UI  
copes pretty well with quite large changes in font sizes).

3) For some reason with this build I noticed Browse wasn't launching.  
It was failing when python was trying to import gnome, seemed fairly  
critical :-) Turned out to be missing the various .so and the  
__init__.py. After copying over the content of /usr/lib/python2.6/site- 
packages/gtk-2.0/gnome from the Soas-strawberry.iso to the XO-1 (same  
path), Browse was happy and launching again.

4) Paul Fox's new power scripts were working reasonably well, smooth  
screen dimming, sleep, shutdown tweaks, lid close. But much too  
intensive for most use; when otherwise idling it would usually dim,  
then wake, them dim, then wake (maybe wireless activity?). And, I did  
find that the XO-1 was intermittently locking up. Rather than sit  
there, constantly wiggling the cursor to keep things alive, you can  
use run powed-config -a. You can also edit the default time-outs in / 
etc/powerd/powerd.conf and find a setting that works for you.

There are the usual know issues with audio playback, recording, XO  
camera support, but nothing unexpected at this point in dev time.

If anyone has a better recommendation for getting 0.84 Sugar on an XO,  
happy to hear it. Perhaps the new F11-for-XO1 build? I've not tried  
that path myself, having only recently got my current XO 0.84 install  
adequately tweaked for my testing needs. Sounds like F11-for-XO1 could  
do with more hands for build testing, would be happy to help if that's  
the future path recommendation.

Regards,
--Gary