Travels with Plink and Cthulhu...

[mdlbear]

... not to mention the XO, which hasn't told me its official name yet. Right now it's just going by "steve", which is the name I gave it when I first booted it. I think that, with a reasonable window manager on it instead of the kid-oriented sugar, it will probably be fine. Or maybe with Debian -- I've been noticing lots of ways in which Fedora's package manager sucks compared to apt.

The biggest problem so far is that it seems to use control-O -- even when you're in terminal mode and ssh'ed to a machine running emacs -- to open the journal application. This is Not A Good Thing when your favorite LJ and mail clients are emacs modes. I've been reluctant to find out what other pootentially-vital keystrokes it eats.

On the other hand, my scheme to carry a basically naked machine across the border and pull in my keys from an encrypted tarball from home worked perfectly. Actually i didn't bother encrypting my ssh identity because it's *already* encrypted with a good passphrase. And the tarball's been deleted by now; I only needed it for a day.

Note to self: if we're going to play this game on a regular basis, the travel keyboard and mouse are essential. I currently have the XO's screen flipped around (halfway to tablet mode) so I can use my Thinkpad keyboard and a travel mouse. Works great.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Care to comment on apt vs. yum? There's a big flap going on over this on the Linux-Journal-run discussion group, and I'd love to have something to throw at Jesse Keating (Fedora's release manager and total RH apologist) on this...

[mdlbear]

Two quick notes: the RPM format, which yum uses, has a lot less dependency information in it. This makes dependecy hell common in RH, and nearly unknown in Debian. I wouldn't hesitate to do a release upgrade in Debian; I tried it once in RH and that was more than enough.

apt treats an install as a transaction: if something goes wrong, the package is marked as "incomplete". Yum just barges ahead, and if it runs out of memory and can't run the post-install script, you're hosed, because the package is in some weird limbo state where it appears to be installed, only you can't uninstall it, and there's no way to force a re-install or a fix. (Can you tell it's happened on this machine? Can you tell I'm annoyed?)

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

Steve sounds nice... It's hard to be afraid of something called "Steve"...

[mdlbear]

True, but a computer should have its own name. One of its problems, actually, is that you're identified by the name of the computer rather than the name of the account, making the XO essentially a single-user machine. But we already have named accounts in the household, so having the same name shared by an account and a laptop would be horribly confusing.

The story of XO

[hazelchaz]

I've been reading your entries with great interest.

I need a USB interface or some other way to read camera memory cards; Perl, SSH/SCP, and a web browser.

Can I do all that on the XO as is? Should I wait and see what happens if/when you Debianize it?

Re: The story of XO

[hazelchaz]

Perl, SSH/SCP...

Oh, and a command prompt. SH, BASH, CSH, doesn't much matter.

Re: The story of XO

[mdlbear]

It's basically Fedora core 7 underneath the sugar UI. It has 3 usb ports and an SD card slot.

This post, in fact, was made by ssh'ing into my home system from the terminal application. It has a couple of oddities, but basically works. I believe it's straightforward to set it up with a different window manager, and probably not too hard to run xdm to make it easy to select. The browser is somewhat oversimplified, but functional. Firefox has glitches but is available.

Perl got installed as a dependency when I installed something or other, probably emacs. The native shell is bash.

Re: The story of XO

[hazelchaz]

So I could use it as-is, then. Good to know.

Re: The story of XO

[chatworthy.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I'm using mine as-is. Haven't changed anything under the hood yet; just doing some python stuff and writing a game as a Sugar application. nano's built in and it's fine for me, except for the control key problem. The ctrl keys I use the most were not remapped. I might be able to remap control keys from within nano; haven't fully investigated yet.

Took it to New Zealand, where I couldn't get into the one wireless network I tried while there, but that was simply because my hosts couldn't remember the password, and we couldn't coax it out of either of the available Apple laptops, which were connected to the wireless. I had a usb to cat-5 adapter along for the ride so I could've gone online hardwired, but it wasn't anything vital and there was cricket on the telly and good food and beer. Later we borrowed the Apples to check email and LJ.

Going through security both ways was easier than with the Apple, simply because of the smaller physical size of the XO. I was too fried to use it aboard the plane, but turning the wireless radio off is a simple command line had I been less exhausted and able to do some coding.

Between planes on the way home, I did connect the xo wirelessly at SFO using the t-mobile hotspot. At the moment, the XO is my main filk book, and I'm slowly working my way through the TamTam music system's source, with the thought of adding the ability to play abc files.

Re: The story of XO

[mdlbear]

I need to make myself a cheat-sheet (in ~, of course) with all the various useful commands.

Re: The story of XO

[chatworthy.livejournal.com]

After I sent this, I learned that in nano, esc esc cmd is the same as ctrl-cmd. This enabled me to code Python one-handed - Trouble is a very possessive cat and all I had free for coding was the one hand last night.