Hacking the OLPC XO Laptop - Part 4: Debian and Ratpoison
Thursday, February 7, 2008
The
other day, I wrote about how I setup the
Xfce desktop as an alternative
desktop environment on the XO (on top of the base
Fedora Linux OS). Then, I
wrote about how I installed
Xubuntu on a USB stick as an alternative boot OS (e.g. - I can
boot into either Xubuntu when the USB stick is in place or, by
pressing one of the game buttons, do a standard
Sugar/Fedora boot). Well, the XO supports multi-boot from the the
base Solid State Drive (SSD) as well as from an alternative drive. In fact, after you do an upgrade of
the OS, you can always revert to the previous version of the OS by
pressing one of the game buttons on startup. I decided to use that
functionality to install
Debian Linux on the SSD as an "alternative" boot OS. I followed
the instructions on
this page and everything installed smoothly. However, after
apt-getting all of the
GNOME dependencies, I quickly filled up the 1GB of
space on the SSD (I probably should have stripped out a lot of the
standard Activities from the standard OS install before I started). As
a result, performance was quite sluggish and I didn't really have
enough spare space on the SSD to do anything. So, although it is
possible, it's definitely not very practical to install multiple different OS'es
on the base 1GB SSD. A far better option is to either install the alternative
OS on a USB stick (as I
did with Xubuntu), or to
install to an SD card. If you will be regularly booting into the
alternative OS, the
SD card route will be the preferred option as the
card can be left permanently in the XO (while USB
sticks typically can't be left in all the time as you
wouldn't be able to close up your XO if you did).
So, I did an
Activated Upgrade and wiped everything off the SSD of my XO and
re-installed the current Sugar/Fedora build (along with the
Xfce desktop as an alternative
desktop environment). I've also setup
Ratpoison on my Xubuntu USB stick and that works fine
there. Now, I can boot to either Sugar/Fedora (on
the SSD),
Xfce/Fedora (on the SSD), Xfce/Ubuntu (on the USB stick), or
Ratpoison/Ubuntu (on the USB stick). However, ideally, I would like to be able to
run Ratpoison as an alternative window manager on the
base Fedora install (this is the first time that I've
ever used Ratpoison and I REALLY like it!). Unfortunately, I'm currently
having some problems trying to get Ratpoison to work on the base
Fedora install. Some people
have provided some clues, but I haven't gotten it going yet. If
anyone has been successful in getting Ratpoison to
work on the base XO Fedora install, please let me know
what you did!!! Actually, I would also be interested
in hearing from anyone who has gotten Ratpoison running on Mac OS X
too.
