[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Sugar on the Asus Eee 701

[Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero]

Forwarding to sugar-dev for relevance.


Rafael Ortiz




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tabitha Roder <tabitha at hrdnz.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 12:54 AM
Subject: Sugar on the Asus Eee 701
To: testing at lists.laptop.org, OLPC Devel <devel at lists.laptop.org>,
olpc-nz at lists.laptop.org


Copy of my blog post on the experience of installing Sugar on Asus Eee 701

Sugar on the Eee

I wanted to put Sugar on an Asus Eee 701 for my niece. Thanks to
Trademe I could pick one up at a reasonable price.  For those that
know me well, yes I had some help with setting up Sugar and yes I had
some help with writing this post.

SOAS Strawberry runs well on the Eee, but you can't really install it.
There are various guides, which basically consist of

Install anaconda
Run liveinst
Fight with partitioning (hint, don't choose automatic, choose custom,
delete everything and make an ext3 partition)
Fix the resulting broken redhat installation with no graphical
interface by installing the entire KDE stack and messing with inittab
(note, you'll need a wired ethernet connection, or epic iwconfig fu)
Install sugar

The first work around was just to dd the SOAS usb image directly onto
the Eee's drive. This was good, the Eee boots quickly and starts sugar
by default, however our USB image was only 1GB so we couldn't use the
rest of the disk, and the journal complained that it was full, even
when it wasn't. I think the journal problem was probably to do with
the tricks the live image performs to boot of read only media, since
we did a byte-for-byte copy of the live image, these are all still
present when booting from the Eee's drive.

I'm told a future version of SOAS may support installation to the hard disk.

The current solution is the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Sugar from
alsroot's PPA. I used the Karmic Koala Beta and updated to the latest
packages. This wasn't entirely plain sailing, Sugar's web browse
activity didn't work until I did apt-get build-dep python-hulahop, see
this bug. This has made the Eee a really nice platform, you can alt
tab between Sugar and your other apps but not the netbook remix menu
thing, so you can't start new non-sugar apps without quitting Sugar.
The only real problem is the Eee 701's low res screen - not all
activities are designed to shrink this far, Scratch being the most
missed example as it is my nieces favourite.

The things you do (or your helper does) to please a nine year old. Big
thanks to said helper for giving up about 10 hours more than I thought
we needed.

Sharing the experience, I hope that this helps the developers see
where the issues were and that next time I try this (I have another
Eee ready) that it is easy to see improvements - I can wait a while
;-)

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