Blog - /Tech

Posted by Ryan Stutsman at Fri Dec 21 00:14:50 2007

Excellent.  What's the battery life like?  I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on hacking on it while away from your desk.  I'm looking for something like this or that new asus thing for a glorified wireless terminal.

Posted by Michael Olson at Fri Dec 21 01:30:54 2007

The battery life is 3-5 hours, because they didn't enable the aggressive sleep after small amount of idleness power management, due to needing to work out some bugs.  Supposedly an update in early Jan. 2008 should make it so that 10 hours is the norm.

As for hacking on it, we'll see about that this weekend.  I'm going to hit the T-mobile hotspot at Border's in Mishawaka, provided that T-mobile will recognize my computer's PIN number by then (it isn't now, probably because I just got the email with that PIN a few hours ago).

Sometimes the OLPC does not want to connect to my home wireless setup, for some reason.  It has been taking about 5 connection attempts before it will associate.  Hopefully that will also be fixed in the next update.  It did better at my dad's house on Wednesday, probably because I had a real wireless router there.

Be aware that Give-One-Get-One ends Dec. 31, and who knows when they'll make them purchasable again after that.

Posted by Aaron at Fri Dec 21 12:34:21 2007

I'll have to see if mine arrived.  Putting Emacs on it is my first todo, too.  Making it into a "glorified wireless terminal", to quote the previous commenter, is my hope.

I'll watch this space.

Posted by Michael Olson at Fri Dec 21 13:20:39 2007

Yeah, "glorified wireless terminal" is a good way to put it.  The Terminal app that they give you by default does not have tabbing, which makes my normal use case for the terminal undoable.  I might perhaps install screen to work around that, probably by putting the binary into ~olpc/bin or some such.  Hopefully the official updates will not hose $HOME.

Posted by aufrank at Tue Dec 25 15:10:16 2007

Hello!  I'm posting this comment from my new XO-- very  enjoyable so far.  Having emacs on this box is priority one.  I'm looking forward to hearing about what steps you take to get this working.

Posted by Mork at Fri Dec 28 17:34:38 2007

Hi all,

I also just received my XO, and it really is a fun laptop. As to installing Emacs (which I will also miss once I start using the XO), this post mentions Zile as a replacement:
http://tsmaster.livejournal.com/250687.html

A simple 'yum install zile' as root worked out of the box for me, but I haven't gotten around trying it yet. (I'm sure I'll still miss Viper-mode and ERC, but you can't have everything -- I might resort to ssh and a university box for these things.)

Has anyone got an idea on how to
i) install Doom (google to find videos of the developers running it)
ii) modify nethack to make it playable using only the on-screen keys
? If so, I'd love any tips. Especially nethack should be a great fit since it's small, works fine without colours, and is easy to play on the go -- now if only it didn't require a full keyboard.

Cheers