rawhide-xo 20090312 daily build n00b observations

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Fri Mar 13 13:49:03 UTC 2009


> I was able to use `zcat 20090312.bootable.gz  > /dev/sdb` in Windows
> XP SP3 under Cygwin.  In case anyone else is stupid enough to use
> Windows,
> * I used `cat /proc/partitions` to figure out what device it was.
> * Twice I had a corrupted FAT32 root directory.  I suspect Windows got
> confused about the altered partitioning.  I wound up running Cygwin's
> `sync` after zcat and then yanking the card out, *not* using Windows
> "Safely Remove Hardware".
>
> ==> One obvious downside of this zcat approach is it writes its own
> partition table, so AIUI until you fiddle with a partition editor, the
> rest of your flash drive is unusable.  It would be nice and work
> better in Windows if Rawhide-XO could use the
> https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ that SoaS recommends.

I think you should be able to use the Windows live usb creator to make
this process someone easier.

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/

> == Booting and login ==
>
> During boot:
>  IO APIC resource could not be allocated
>  Unable to find persistent overlay: using temporary X 2
>  /bin/mknod: /dev/loop{0..7}: File exists x 8

I've seen this on occasion when running the image in a virtualised
env. I has assumed it was just a bad rawhide day. Maybe not so.

>  Deprecated config file /etc/modprobe.conf + other modprobe warnings
>
> I got a login screen with overlapping garbled text at the lower right.
>  It had a chooser for keyboard which defaulted to en_US keyboard.
>
> The first time before I did anything it auto-logged me into a Gnome-ish desktop.
> The second time I booted I scrolled through the keyboard list looking
> for an English OLPC Keyboard layout , but could not find one, just
> Afghanistan OLPC keyboards (yet there is "OLPC" in Gnome Keyboard
> preferences).  While looking at this I got auto-logged in again.

For a UK English layout you should be able to select United Kingdom in
the drop down. It works for me.

> == Gnome/X ==
> The Gnome desktop: Pretty snappy, not bad!  I've previously only used
> Gnome for a few minutes under emulation.
>
> I got an alert "Error activating XKB configuration". Is this the same
> as the "1. complained about the keyboard map" that others reported?
> Here are the two commands the alert told me to run
> $ xprop -root | grep XKB
>  _XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "evdev", "pc105+inet", "us", "", ""
>  _XKB_RULES_NAMES_BACKUP(STRING) same
>
> $ gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd
>  layouts = [en_US.UTF-8]
>  options = []
>  model =

That is a known rawhide issue at the moment, not just one for the OLPC build.

> Clicking the web and mail icons gave errors "Could not launch
> application  Firefox/evolution" (they're not installed)

No they're not.

> == Sugar ==
> How do I launch activities in Gnome?  In Terminal I tried
> `sugar-activity Pippy` and got SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH is not defined in the
> environment.

There's a drop down on the login screen which should allow you to
choose gnome or sugar as the desktop.

> I chose [Shutdown], I didn't get the OLPC cautions graphic.

I'm pretty sure this is a known issue.

Peter




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