Last night, I put Ubuntu 8.04 (running the GNOME desktop) on an SD card of mine (thus disabling my camera for the time being) and booted it on the OLPC XO-1:
I avoided doing this for a while, as I know it kind of defeats the purpose of having an XO, but it’s been educational doing it, and I’m impressed with the results.
First thing I noticed was the speed. It’s much faster than I thought it would be, and about the same speed as Ubuntu would be on a 300MHz or 400MHz Pentium II desktop.
The webcam is detected as /dev/video0 and shows as a Video4Linux 2 device to GStreamer; however, it bombs out with some error that I can’t make head or tails of. Also, neither Cheese nor VLC will display the webcam.
Initially, I thought the audio was broken, but I found it was because the user I had created hadn’t been added to the audio group. Editing /etc/group and doing a logout-login cycle fixed that.
The touchpad was very finicky — much more so than in Sugar. Most annoying was that “tapping” had been enabled, where tapping on the touchpad would result in a mouse click. Well, it didn’t even need to be a “tap” — even lifting your finger off the touchpad lightly would sometimes result in a mouse click or two.
Fortunately, by adding the line “option mousedev tap_time=0” to /etc/modprobe.d/olpc.conf.dist, the tapping was disabled. Much better.
Been doing some video playback and audio playback — video is not too bad, but the audio is crackly. Probably PulseAudio’s fault. Need to work on that.
Next step: trying out Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition (a.k.a. hildon-desktop).
