<html>
<head>
<style>
.hmmessage P
{
margin:0px;
padding:0px
}
body.hmmessage
{
FONT-SIZE: 10pt;
FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma
}
</style>
</head>
<body class='hmmessage'>So, I got an OLPC through G1G1.<BR>
<BR>It's just a very low end Linux/x86 machine.<BR>(AMD Geode or such.)<BR>
<BR>1gig of flash, about 1/3rd full upon delivery<BR>256 meg RAM.<BR>Running Fedora Core 7, with modifications.<BR>X Windows.<BR>A window manager I'd never heard of before -- "matchbox" I think.<BR>
<BR>It comes with<BR> ld, as, awk, sed, python, gdb, nano, vi, smalltalk? (eToys)<BR> it can record sound, still pictures, video, but the recorded video quality is terrible <BR> it has a Mozilla-based browser<BR> It has a decent gui text editor, but with indecent file open/save behavior, so not usable<BR>
<BR>It comes withOUT<BR> gcc, perl, headers, libs, emacs, kate, nedit, make, ruby, tcl <BR> (kate is the most tolerable Unix editor I have found so far, used it some on Linux/PPC.)<BR>
<BR>cminstall runs ok and finds ld and as.<BR>It turns out, you can point ld at .so files and it seems to mostly<BR>work, but the resulting programs crash early on, I think<BR>for lack of the usual startup code, since argv is 0 and argc<BR>and envp are "large negative numbers" -- I'm pretty sure<BR>envp wasn't a valid address, and the actual error was due to argc<BR>being negative. Oh and you have to give ld the -I for interpret<BR>name command.<BR>
<BR>But you can just do:<BR> su<BR> yum install gcc <BR>
<BR>and easily/quickly/cheaply fill out the development environment, besides<BR>doing development on another machine and copying the files over, or besides<BR>just not caring at all about these machines, so catering to the missing<BR>gcc is probably not worthwhile. I'm still curious to look how the<BR>command line is usually retrieved.<BR>
<BR>You can go at least go so far as: <BR> su<BR> yum install kdevelop automake autoconf emacs ruby tcl tk make perl nedit gcc <BR>
<BR>The machine is quite slow.<BR>The keyboard is really small and /incredibly/ uncomfortable to use.<BR> I don't think mind it being "membrane", but the small keys are really hard on adult hands.<BR>I must try an external one. And an external drive to avoid writing too much and for more space,<BR>so that I might try building the Modula-3 system here.<BR>
<BR>The screen has a high DPI so the text console is very hard to read.<BR>Even nedit, xterm, kdevelop suffer from the high DPI. There must be a setting to fix this<BR>but I havn't found it yet. (They have a "Terminal" activity that is perfectly readable/usable.)<BR>I haven't booted into single user mode yet. I think I need a developer key, have to wait<BR>a day for that.<BR>
<BR>It uses OpenFirmware I believe.<BR>
<BR>
If you run too many of the "activities", bogs down and must power cycle.<BR>
<BR>
I think it has no swap, so 256meg is it.<BR>(swap would probably kill the flash, and be even slower than usual)<BR>
<BR>I originally "used", barely, Modula-3 I think on a system with 64meg.<BR>Or maybe 16 or 32.<BR>Not to mention much smaller systems.<BR>
<BR>
I don't YET have an EEPC or whatever it is called but it is probably much better.<BR>
<BR>There's plenty of information at <A href="http://www.laptop.org">www.laptop.org</A>.<BR>
<BR>I know this is only barely on topic, but I thought fellow geeks might be interested. :)<BR>
<BR> - Jay<BR></body>
</html>