[M3devel] OLPC "XO" laptop

[Jay]

So, I got an OLPC through G1G1.
It's just a very low end Linux/x86 machine.(AMD Geode or such.)
1gig of flash, about 1/3rd full upon delivery256 meg RAM.Running Fedora Core 7, with modifications.X Windows.A window manager I'd never heard of before -- "matchbox" I think.
It comes with  ld, as, awk, sed, python, gdb, nano, vi, smalltalk? (eToys)  it can record sound, still pictures, video, but the recorded video quality is terrible   it has a Mozilla-based browser  It has a decent gui text editor, but with indecent file open/save behavior, so not usable
It comes withOUT  gcc, perl, headers, libs, emacs, kate, nedit, make, ruby, tcl   (kate is the most tolerable Unix editor I have found so far, used it some on Linux/PPC.)
cminstall runs ok and finds ld and as.It turns out, you can point ld at .so files and it seems to mostlywork, but the resulting programs crash early on, I thinkfor lack of the usual startup code, since argv is 0 and argcand envp are "large negative numbers" -- I'm pretty sureenvp wasn't a valid address, and the actual error was due to argcbeing negative. Oh and you have to give ld the -I for interpretname command.
But you can just do:  su  yum install gcc 
and easily/quickly/cheaply fill out the development environment, besidesdoing development on another machine and copying the files over, or besidesjust not caring at all about these machines, so catering to the missinggcc is probably not worthwhile. I'm still curious to look how thecommand line is usually retrieved.
You can go at least go so far as:   su  yum install kdevelop automake autoconf emacs ruby tcl tk make perl nedit gcc 
The machine is quite slow.The keyboard is really small and /incredibly/ uncomfortable to use.  I don't think mind it being "membrane", but the small keys are really hard on adult hands.I must try an external one. And an external drive to avoid writing too much and for more space,so that I might try building the Modula-3 system here.
The screen has a high DPI so the text console is very hard to read.Even nedit, xterm, kdevelop suffer from the high DPI. There must be a setting to fix thisbut I havn't found it yet. (They have a "Terminal" activity that is perfectly readable/usable.)I haven't booted into single user mode yet. I think I need a developer key, have to waita day for that.
It uses OpenFirmware I believe.
 
If you run too many of the "activities", bogs down and must power cycle.
 
I think it has no swap, so 256meg is it.(swap would probably kill the flash, and be even slower than usual)
I originally "used", barely, Modula-3 I think on a system with 64meg.Or maybe 16 or 32.Not to mention much smaller systems.
 
I don't YET have an EEPC or whatever it is called but it is probably much better.
There's plenty of information at www.laptop.org.
I know this is only barely on topic, but I thought fellow geeks might be interested. :)
 - Jay
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