So here's the question...

[mdlbear]

... should I try to do a weekend trip with nothing but the XO, or should I take the Mac as well. The XO's keyboard isn't an issue, since I have a good one I can take along -- it would work better with a Linux box than it does with the Mac. The XO's screen and battery life are fantastic.

But the browser is *not* Firefox, and it doesn't do tabs as far as I can tell. The window manager is weird -- basically the whole thing is aimed at kids -- and the IM client only talks Jabber. OTOH, I might be able to dual-boot it with Ubuntu, in which case I'd probably be pretty happy with it.

I'd borrow the Asus Eee from work; it's more like a "traditional" Linux laptop. But then I'd have to get a new one for Colleen...

(Added 0401: I can almost certainly do everything I need to via ssh to home; there's even a console version of my usual IM app (finch, the console version of pidgin). That would have the added advantage of leaving the log files on my home machine. I'm already used to posting to LJ via an ssh connection.)

Comments

Browser Doesn't Do Tabs?

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

I can open multiple instances of the browser (in the Sugar view you get with the single-dot key), and then copy and paste URLs from one to another with the more or less standard ^C and ^V rigamarole. I can then edit each instance of the URL separately to point them to different pages.

You might or might not find that a good workaround for the browser's lack of tabs.

Something else I haven't tried but which should work is to open a Terminal and create a text file of URLs to paste into the browser. That may or may not be less clunky than the browser's Bookmarking system.

Re: Browser Doesn't Do Tabs?

[mdlbear]

What I'm used to doing with tabs is to use middle-click to open linked pages in new tabs, and then read them later.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I got the impression you don't like the Mac, so my advice would be to take the computer you like. Unless it's a work trip, or something and the XO won't do what you need for work.

[mdlbear]

Good point. It's not a work trip -- this is FKO -- although even if it was I do most of my work on Linux. It was too close to the start of the fiscal year for me to have started lobbying for a Thinkpad X61T; should have thought of that earlier, but I got, um..., distracted.

I can probably do everything I need to via ssh to home, though, so the XO should work OK.

[mneme]

FWIW, Firefox and Opera both install reasonably easily on the XO.

My impression is that Opera's a bit snappier, but the sugarized version has an odd (if not too annoying) bug that it creates an extra "window" as far as the sugar VM is concerned.

I should see if I can install Pidgin on either the x300 (currently still running Windows only; haven't had enough time to try even a windows-centric linux install) or the XO.

[mdlbear]

Is the repository already configured, or do I have to edit something? I'm totally unfamiliar with Fedora.

[mdlbear]

... ok, there's actually quite a lot of software there. Ubuntu may not be necessary.

[mdlbear]

pidgin doesn't install on the XO - there's a missing dependency. Yum's dependency handling and error handling seem to be sadly lacking relative to apt's. I had some "out of memory" errors while installing emacs, and there appears to be no way to persuade yum to either run the damned post-install scripts, or even remove the broken packages so they can be re-installed.

Definitely reinforces my already-low opinion of RH.

[mneme]

Oh, no argument -- Yum is awful, particularly in comparison to apt. It's nicer to have on the XO than the XO would be without any package management -- but still...

What might work re Emacs would be to set up swap on an SD card and then just rpm --force the emacs rpm by hand. Or...I'm sI'm guessing that yum left it around somewhere (don't have my XO with me to check exactly where, though I have it at home). I've yet to try installing emacs on my XO -- but then, I've gotten less emacs-dependant, over the years, switching comfortably between it and vi depending on context, mostly out of self defense.

re cleanup...hmmm. From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

Tip: Find and review "lost" packages. You can find orphaned packages (ie packages not in the repositories anymore) after the upgrade with the tool package-cleanup from the yum-utils package yum install yum-utils; package-cleanup --orphans. It's often helpful to run this command before the update, too. For packages with a failing "%postun" script the old package will remain partly installed. Remove it with rpm -e package-name-and-version

Is that helpful?

[mdlbear]

That looks like it might work. Looks tedious, though. And in order to rpm --force the packages I'd have to download them by hand, too -- yum appears to clean up after itself a little too thoroughly.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you need to download rpm's by hand? I vaguely recall installing an rpm with a single sudo command (or maybe with Sugar it was a su -i foo command). I vaguely recall that Opera had an xo package on the wiki...

[mdlbear]

Unfortunately, these are RPMs that were partially installed by yum, and later deleted. I have no idea where yum got them from, so I'm going to have to track all of that down.

rpm will install from a URL, but that presupposes that you have one rather than having to derive it from the scraps of information yum is willing to give you.