Archive for October, 2009

curse you wpmu for stripping away my object tag!

Here is the video…  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHoDsZDMH_Y&feature=player_embedded

I saw this a little while ago and it looks like a great way for the kids to have a computer of their own. Yesterday we stopped in at the office and while we were there I grabbed the old laptop I had bought a while ago with them in mind. It’s a compaq presario running win 95 and doesn’t even boot right actually but the body is really sturdy so for $20 I thought it was the perfect kids first real laptop.

So today they both took a nap - in fact they’re right over there on the couch - and while they’re snoozing I thought I’d give this a shot. I went to the soas homepage ( http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick ) and followed the instructions there and am just waiting while the live usb creator does it’s thing ( https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ ). That live usb creator looks like a great little thing by the way. can make your usb stick a live bootable linux os. I’m trying it on our 2GB usb stick from the office. if it works I guess I’ll have to get another one for work.

Ok great - looks like it’s complete - i’ll post later with an update!

UPDATE

Ok it’s a compaq presario 1694 and it’s running win 98 but it looks like it is booting up into windows after all! it’s not recognizing the usb drive though - looks like it wants a driver. need to add the usb to the boot options…

UPDATE 2

Things have stalled out mostly becuase the dang laptop is so old. it won’t run the stick because it wants drivers - win98 didn’t automatically handle drivers like things do now remember :P. there’s no ethernet jack - only a phone jack - so it’s proving difficult to get online and transfer files to it. Tried running a live ubuntu cd and that didn’t work - i think because it only has 64MB of RAM and the ubuntu live cd needs more than that. I mean this thing is so old it has a floppy disk drive in it. Not giving up though - i’m still hoping to get some newer version of linux installed on it to handle the usb drivers and then i should be in business. more to come!

Also, after digging into it more I think that the memory requirements for running

I ran into a problem where I needed to reset my CVS password. Usually you can just fetch a module list or try to checkout a module from the same repository and it will prompt you. That wasn’t working this time though - I suspect because I had to VPN to get to the repo.  So instead of that hack I had to actually learn how to do it the right way! Here’s what you do…

First - try to update the module and copy your error message as this has the paths you need already nicely figured out. You just need the top command part. Mine was:

In I:\projects\foobar\sourcecode\CoursePlatform: “C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS\cvs.exe” -q -x update -d -P
CVSROOT=:sspi:jdost@foobar.org:/CVS

Next - in notepad or a text editor replace ‘update’ with ‘logout’

Then in a cmd prompt navigate to your module directory - “I:\projects\foobar\sourcecode\CoursePlatform” in the example.

Then paste and run the command minus that “In I:\projects\foobar\sourcecode\CoursePlatform:” part.

It didn’t return any messages but may be a switch for that or something. Anyways - next time you try cvs update it should prompt you to enter your password!

That’s it