Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Results from first day

The XO seems to have some strange issues with my wireless at home and I was only able to get it online for 30 minutes but in that time I learned several things.
  1. You can share activities across the whole Internet
  2. Google Video does not work (due to gnash lacking .flv file support apparently) Maybe I can install regular flash?
  3. Normal computers can connect to the XO's mesh network (though it crashed my network card after a while).It shows up as "olpc-mesh"
  4. Support for WPA appears to be very finicky
After trying for several hours to get it back online, I decided to try a firmware upgrade using a USB thumbdrive.At first it was giving me an error about "wrong machine type" but I found that taking it in 2 firmware steps worked fine.

Then I decided to start messing around with gasp , and I figured out several things
  • In some areas of the system ,gasp works just fine natively but if it is part of an activity it needs(or rather pygame does) the olpcgame wrapper.
  • Its better suited for building activities then being an activity itself
  • Someone has already mentioned gasp as a useful game development tool on the game development page (this certainly was not me)
  • Pippy example code would be really sweet.
Then ,just for fun , I decided to find out if it was possible to get activities installed without internet access.The answer is that yes it is possible,but you still have to go trough the browser(only to your usb drive instead of a website).So installed Sim City, which runs great.
Of course the nostalgia ran out in about 10 minutes,but it was still fun.

Well, hopefully I can figure out my networking issues and dig deeper into this great device.

3 comments:

LearniT-TeachiT said...

Matt,

Yeah, the gnash player does not accept Flash files. There is a linux version of Flash that you can download from the Adobe site. There are also some specific steps that you need to follow to accomplish this. I had a tech from the OLPC corp help me do this on one of the laptops I have. I will find the instructions and post them in another comment. If you would like, I will also connect you by telephone with the tech so that he can walk you through installing this (and he can answer other questions as well).

Matthew Gallagher said...

Yeah, I thought as much. I noticed that someone previously attempted to install flash on this laptop and failed. If I figure it out I will write a python or bash script to make it easy.

LearniT-TeachiT said...

Fantastic. here are the instructions that the OLPC folks had originally provided me. I think this is why it didn't work!
To install flash player plugin 9 for the gecko/xulrunner web browser, do the following:

Open a terminal as root
Download the plugin file:
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
Unpack it:
tar xzvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
Run the flashplayer-installer and follow instructions (the install folder is /usr/lib/xulrunner-XXXXX/):
./flashplayer-installer