BitFreedom

I got my XO laptop from laptopgiving.org today. I plugged it in and waited the whole day, but I think it was already charged. There’s no way to tell if it’s done charging or not (I think).

It’s interesting. The keyboard is exceedingly small, and the keys are like those flexible keyboards. But I guess it wasn’t meant to teach typing skills. Also it has a touchpad mouse with two mouse buttons: X and O (of course). It has 3 USB ports, a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a rotating screen, built-in speakers, a built-in microphone, and what appears to be a built-in camera.

I posted some pictures on Picasa:

XO

I managed to surf the net with it a little bit and investigate:

• Memory is just under 256 MB
• 1 GB disk space
• Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
• processor Geode AMD 430 MHz w/ 128K cache

The final word on this review: this laptop is great for kids.

Updates

I’ve been getting questions about it, so I’ll answer them as they come in.

• Is the display black and white? It does support color, but it seems to have a lot of black/white/gray as a base color.

A lot of people use the same password for everything. This is a bad idea. If someone discovers the password to one thing, then they have the password to everything. But it’s hard to make a different password for every login that you use. That’s why I create 4 passwords or variations upon them to be able to remember while keeping things fairly secure. I also have one “insecure” password that I use for things that are unimportant and use insecure connections. Different levels of passwords for important data:

* Bank
* Email
* Webmail
* Shell account

My little AWStats configuration to keep track of rotated logs. Takes a little more time, but helps ensure nothing is missing.

LogFile=”cat /var/log/maillog.1 /var/log/maillog | /opt/awstats/tools/maillogconvert.pl standard |”

I set up a couple of the nodes for my cluster. It took me a couple of days to set up the node I named “justice” which was my first. Today I did “courage” using what I learned from setting up the first one.

I used ParallelKnoppix to boot, and installed it with the knx2hd command. Then I setup the node on the cluster network in /etc/network/interfaces, and /etc/resolv.conf. I removed kdm, installed gdm, and then with ssh X forwarding, I ran gdmsetup to allow XDMCP connections.

I bought the hardware at an auction. The 8 computers (pentium 2) cost about $50 total. The metal shelving cost under $20. I bought a cheap 16-port hub separately, and have received power and ethernet cables from others. Someone even gave me a mouse and keyboard to use, and I have been using an old monitor someone else was throwing out.

The total cost of my cluster so far is under $100. However, it’s taken a lot more time than I expected. Part of that is to collect the equipment. Most of it is setup and maintanence. It’s interesting, because you learn that just getting hardware for cheap doesn’t mean it ends there. Not only has it taken up a lot of my time (and isn’t over yet), but I’ve had to find room to set up the equipment in my small apartment.

Update: I am posting the Belkin F5D6020 driver for download.  Download bel6020.sys and bel6020.inf for use with ndiswrapper.

Yesterday I got a Belkin notebook wireless card [Belkin F5D6020 (Version 3.0) 802.11b wireless PCMCIA for my laptop that runs Debian. I spent the entire evening, but I eventually got it to work using a wonderful tool called ndiswrapper which allows you to use Windows network drivers in Linux. The version numbers are important because they correspond to different chipsets that are on the card. I started by doing an apt-get install ndiswrapper\* but you should see below that the current version for Debian doesn’t work.

Getting the Windows Drivers:
The first issue I had was with the CD that came with the card. I haven’t tested the CD on Windows, but it had I/O errors when trying to read it from Linux. I wonder if this is a Windows vs Linux CD format issue, or if it’s just a bad CD. I have to think it’s the latter. So I went to the Belkin site and downloaded the driver .exe file for Windows 98. (In this case, I pretty much believed that all of the drivers for Windows were the same file, but usually Windows 98 is the safest to try.) Unfortunately this .exe is an installer for the software, so I had to use wine to run it, install it in my fake windows, and copy the drivers out. After using wine to install, the drivers can be found in ~/.wine/fake_windows/windows/OPTIONS/CABS/ and they are called bel6020.inf and Bel6020.sys. You can copy these files anywhere (such as to your home directory) or you can use them directly from this directory because when you install them into ndiswrapper, it will make a copy for itself under /etc/ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper:
The next problem I had was with the version of ndiswrapper that comes with Debian. Despite following the steps (see links below) I had found online, the driver simply wouldn’t work. ndiswrapper -l reports that everything is fine, but if you use dmesg, you will see that something doesn’t work–in my case at least that it could not allocate the memory for this driver. I downloaded the source and compiled the latest version (0.12) which solved the problem. (You should use dmesg and lspci to make sure the install went well.)

$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i bel6020.inf
$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l
$ /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
$ dmesg
$ lspci
$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m


Creating the wireless interface:
Since my first attempts to use the older version of ndiswrapper didn’t work, I struggled with trying to figure out why I couldn’t set up the wireless interface. After I used the newer version, it worked, but still doesn’t bring up the interface automatically on boot. It doesn’t remember the essid. (This is still unresolved.) But the good news is, I can configure and bring up the interface by hand after boot. You need to install wireless-tools. Use iwgetid to get an essid, and iwconfig to set up the interface.

$ /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid default
$ /sbin/ifup wlan0


Links:
http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9758

Thanks to Marcus Hall:

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 04:32:41PM -0400, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> Using the standard bourn shell script (/bin/sh), is there a way to make
> all output by default direct to another fd besides stdout/stderr?
>
> What I mean is there any way to have the entire script redirect output
> to the same place without having to tack &> onto the end of everything?

Sure!

Try:

exec >file

You can also re-direct stderr with:

exec 2>err_file

That is, the following script will write output to a log file in /tmp:

#!/bin/bash
exec >/tmp/logoutput 2>&1

echo Command executed on $(date)
ls -l / | grep fred
ps -fae >/tmp/ps_output

The output (and stderr) are directed to /tmp/logoutput. The echo and
grep both get their output directed automatically. The ps command
overrides this, and gets re-directed to a different file.

–
Marcus Hall