One Laptop Per Child ... a beautiful project!

It's arrived

Our OLPC laptop (where I am just typing these notes) has arrived some weeks ago, with the help of Peter Thoeny, a good friend of mine that has been my po-box in the States for the laptop I got through the G1G1 (Give one Get one) program.

The kids love it ... even if they play more with the home PC, that' a lot bigger.

It's a very nice machine, running a slightly hacked version of the Fedora 7 distribution.

It's a little slow {600 Mhz) but with a very nice screen.

Installing Cups

This is not so difficult:

• install samba and samba-client yum install samba samba-client
• install cups yum install cups
  • notice that the on-line documentation and icons are not installed by default. I have downloaded the rpm separately and manually unzipped the /usr/share/doc/cups... directory in its proper place. Probably an appropriate rpm/yum option could avoid this step.
• add the cups service chkconfig cups on and start it service cups start
• set a root password
  • su -
  • passwd root
• open the http://root:your_root_password@localhost:631/admin page and add a printer
• install the https://twiki.di.uniroma1.it/pub/Users/AndreaSterbini/OLPC/Cups-1.xo activity (it's just a gmail activity with an icon stolen from an ubuntu package)
  • Notice that the activity does not handle properly the global locale setting. To get the Cups pages in your language you could add a DefaultLanguage option to the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file.

Playing with Lejos and Lego Mindstorms NXT

I have been able to install Lejos NXJ on the OLPCand load some programs on the brick with USB. (but I have not yet solved the bluetooth communication)

I jot down what I remember ... I will clean-up these instructions later.

You need to install some prerequisites before compiling the lejos NXJ tools

• install Java
• yum install gcc
• yum install scons
• yum install libusb-devel
• yum install bluez-libs-devel
• yum install make
• download the lejos linux package from lejos.org
• download the libnxt package from libnxt.sf.net

Then

• Install Java and set-up the JAVA_HOME environment variable (e.g. in your /etc/profile )
• unzip lejos and libnxt
• copy the libnxt-0.3/flash_write/flash.bin file to lejos_nxj/src/libnxt/flash_write directory
• enter the lejos_nxj/src/libnxt dir and call scons
• enter the lejos_nxj/src/jbluez dir and call make

Notice: for some reasons the jni.h include file was not found. I have added the option -I/usr/java/jdk.../include -I/usr/java/jdk.../include/linux to the scons config file

Notice: the makefile of jbluez did'nt work ... I had to do the two compile steps by hand