Sunday, April 19, 2009

Ubuntu on XO

Today I finally got Ubuntu to work on my XO.

With some Christmas money I purchased a 4Gig SD card. I even shopped around until I could find the kind that read/write faster than your standard SD card to give better performance. I tried a few months ago when I first purchased the card, and I followed all the instructions at http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4053.0, but upon reboot I still just got the regular Sugar desktop. After a while I put it on the back burner.

Tonight I picked the project back up and finally got it working. It turns out I missed the very last step of getting the developer key, where the key is actually placed in the /security folder. After I solved that, my Ubuntu was in business.

The thing runs much faster than I expected. In fact, it runs really well. I changed some of the panel configurations, and installed some more applications, like GCompris for the kids.

The installation comes with some quirks, such as no region set, and the microphone light is constantly on, which can all be resolved by following the instructions at http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4057.msg27470;topicseen#msg27470.

Currently, I am backing up the SD card, and am going to attempt a Jaunty install. If that works find then I'm going to install gnome-desktop and remove xfce-desktop and see what kind of performance I get.

My main motivation for this is that my kids where having trouble figuring out the Sugar interface. My seven-year old has it mostly figured out, but not Athena (5.) We run all Ubuntu in the house, so they are pretty good with getting around in it.

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