using rawhide XO

[Scott Douglass]

Hi,

Rawhide on XO is shaping up nicely, and as a multiple G1G1 owner I'm
happy to see that there is a future for my machines!

Here are steps I took to make it more fun:

1. remove all the "live cd" functions

I install the Rawhide images to NAND and have an SD card with a couple
of partitions, one is for swap and one is for my OLPC data
(including /security/develop.sig)

Since the NAND is read/write, no need for the live system overlay and
all the loopback mounts. Disabling this speeds up the startup/boot
process dramatically.

chkconfig livesys off
chkconfig livesys-late off

remove the /etc/gdm/custom.conf to prevent the timed auto login using
the liveuser.

I changed the liveuser from /etc/passwd and /etc/group to have my
regular username and set passwords for both my account and root

Edit out some things from /boot/olpc.fth as well such as console on serial port etc. I am using:

root=mtd0 rootfstype=jffs2 video=lxfb lxfb.mode_option=1200x900 at 51

Now, it's "installed to disk."

2. GDM simple greeter fonts are too big and controls are obscured

Login as myself to a GNOME session, set the font DPI in the Appearance
control panel (I am happy with 120 DPI)

Copy the gconf settings from my home directory to the home directory of
the gdm user:

sudo cp -r ~scott/.gonf/desktop ~gdm/.gconf
sudo chown -R gdm:gdm ~gdm/.gconf

the file ~gdm/.gconf/desktop/gnome/font_rendering/%gconf.xml is where
you can set the DPI to make the greeter more usable.

3. auto find/use swap partition on SD card

One nice thing that the livesys init script did was finding and enabling
swap partitions. I took that bit out of the script and added it
to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

. /etc/init.d/functions

# enable swaps unless requested otherwise
swaps=`blkid -t TYPE=swap -o device`
if ! strstr "`cat /proc/cmdline`" noswap && [ -n "$swaps" ] ; then
  for s in $swaps ; do
    action "Enabling swap partition $s" swapon $s
  done
fi


4. moving the yum cache so there's enough disk space to groupinstall
"Development Tools" and XFCE (and of course yum update...)

Created a symlink to move /var/cache/yum onto my SD card

ShanghaiScott