Using the XO with the gnome image

[Josh Bressers]

So previously I voiced my concern over getting gnome to run on the XO.  I'm
not not convinced it's a good idea, but here's how to make it work.  My SD
card has a 512M swap partition and a 2 Gig overlay (I have the 4 Gig card).

If you don't fix the image, the machine will eat up too much RAM and
won't run, so you need to use an overlay file so the changes stick between
reboots.

First, make the laptop boot into single user mode (runlevel 1).  To do
this, mount the SD card, open boot/olpc.fth and look for the line that looks
like this:
root=UUID=48EE-AC2A rootfstype=vfat rw liveimg overlay=UUID=48EE-AC2A quiet
rhgb

Add a 1 , as in the number one, before the quiet, so it should look like:
"overlay=UUID=48EE-AC2A 1 quiet"

Boot the SD card and it will drop you into a root prompt.

Now, once you have a prompt, you need to disable some services.  Here is
the list I disabled, you can obviously pick and choose.  To do this, run
the command 'chkconfig <service> off" replacing <service> with an actual
name.  For example 'chkconfig setroubleshoot off'.

At the very least, turn off setroubleshoot, that's the one really eat a lot of RAM.

Here is the list of services I've shut off:
setroubleshoot sendmail rsyslog rpcidmapd rpcgssd rpcbind portreserve
nfslock netfs mdmonitor kerneloops irqbalance cups bluetooth avahi-daemon
auditd

I admit, I'm not completely sure about all the rpc stuff I'm shutting off,
but it doesn't seem to have an adverse affect.

Now shutdown the XO, and remove the 1 you added above, then boot back into the
SD card.

Now once you get into Gnome, it's still doing many sill things.  Open
the Session Preferences tool (System->Preferences->Personal->Sessions) and
just remove most of the stuff there.  The things I kept are:
Gnome Settings Daemon, Gnome Settings Daemon Helper, Network Manager, Power
Manager, and PulseAudio Sound System

This leaves me with enough free memory to run various things without too
much trouble.

-- 
    JB