ConFigures

Tour of OLPC at NoVaLUG: How We Did

Jonathan Blocksom and I were pretty happy with how our talk went at the Northern Virginia Linux User Group last Saturday.  There were over 30 people there, and we got  questions  throughout  (and  into  the parking lot).  I had to slow  myself  down  when  I  talked  too  fast or moved the  mouse too fast (the  presentation  software  couldn’t keep  up),  but  other than that, once we got going, it all went pretty smoothly.

My part (an overview of the XO:  hardware and software  interfaces,  home view, activities, etc.) took over half the time because  I  was  first, and so a lot of general questions came my way (though Jonathan took on several of them).  Some people were almost as  interested as I am in how the Journal works as a combined file manager, metadata, activity log, and version control system.  Jonathan’s interactive  demo of the learn-programming  activities (Pippy for learning Python, Turtle Art (sort of like LOGO), and eToys (from Squeak, smalltalk-related) also went well (more questions!).

Technical details for giving the presentation:

• Rather than trying to use Open Office to run slides (which I had heard is pretty slow on the XO), I just put my main points  into the XO’s Write activity.  Not a perfect solution, but they showed up well on Oracle’s big screens, and I was able to scroll down as I talked — I knew my points pretty well, and it was more of show -and-tell presentation than a heavily-detailed slides presentation anyway.
• Before the talk, I went to the OLPC Remote Display wiki page and tried to download x11vnc as per instructions there.  I encountered an Unexpected Error message and got a lot of help from people (Mike Cariaso, FFM, etc.) at the OLPCLCDC meetup Thursday night (Jan. 31).  It actually turned out that the errors I was getting stopped once I shut down all other activites before running the rpm command to get x11vnc onto my XO.
• Also at the meetup, I bought a lovely XO-compatible USB-Ethernet adaptor (prototype) from Jonathan Hsu.  They come in three flavors (XO-green, Wii-silver, and clear-circuit-board).   If you scroll down Leslie Bradshaw’s blog entry about the meetup, you’ll see a picture of the one I got.  It came in very handy during our test attempt and the presentation itself, because the Wifi connection has to be pretty stable for the VNC software to work.  So we used XO-ZoWii-Ethernet-someotherUSBethernetadaptor-loaner Linux laptop instead of wireless.
• My friend Phil Salkie loaned us his Linux laptop (running client VNC software to my XO’s x11vnc server), fought through many issues during the test attempt (hooking up to a monitor he’d brought along), and came to the presentation to help us hook the loaner laptop up to the Oracle projector system, working through the complexity of their twin-screen projector.  Thanks, Phil!
• This week I updated the Remote Display wiki page to incorporate short versions of the tips above.  Thanks to Mike Lee and others for pointing me there in the first place — it was a big help!