So, I finally got me an OLPC XO laptop offa eBay at a price that I was comfortable with.

Anybody here have any experience making this device useful and productive for an adult (at least legally, at heart I'm pretty immature)?

Mainly, I want to use it for web browsing, email and personal productivity (calendar and to-do), reading ebooks and PDFs, maybe OpenOffice.

I'll also use it to replace pen & paper when playing dungeons & dragons with my friends. (Is that an adult use? hehehe)

So, I'm leaning towards PuppyLinux, or maybe trying my hand at customizing my own Debian install.

I'd prefer to hear from people who actually USE an XO as a laptop or "personal productivity device", but I certainly won't poo-poo advice from others who only have peripheral experience with the XO.

Thanks in advance!

I don't use an XO, so for what it is worth:

Perhaps the easiest approach is to keep the underlying Fedora, and just replace the Sugar 'desktop' with something like XFCE.

There have also been Ubuntu installations onto OLPCs. One of these uses XFCE. The other possibility is to install the Netbook remix of Ubuntu.

Even if you end up rolling your own distro, it would be worth looking at these to see what tweaks they have made.

Good suggestions.

I've also found DebXO, a Debian remix specifically for the XO, with a good choice of different desktops. I'm leaning towards going this route, and using LXDE for the desktop.

The biggest downside to moving away from the preinstalled Fedora seems to be that you lose the XO's special power management software. Since I want to use my XO as a sort of oversized PDA, battery life is a big consideration.

(Off topic: I sure do wish it has a touch screen. Actually, it seems stupid for any netbook to not have a touch screen. I understand with the XO the cost and battery life considerations prohibited a touch screen, but Asus, Acer, etc, should really put touch screens on their netbooks.)

Update: I tried using the built-in Fedora and running LXDE on top of it. It worked relatively well, but I couldn't find a decent GUI for managing my wireless connection. So, I either had to fight with WPA_Supplicant, or I had to switch over to Sugar to connect to a wireless network. I also found that the YUM repository was extremely lacking.

So I wiped my XO clean and installed DebXO with LXDE. I'm VERY happy with it. I can get virtually anything I need via apt-get, and wicd is a great little network manager. I haven't had any problems with battery life, so the lack of power management doesn't seem to be a problem (XScreensaver dims the screen when necessary). Plus I THINK it has a smaller memory footprint than the original Fedora did, but I have no hard facts on that.

Anyhoo, I've managed to install the following apps on the thing, and I still have over 150mb left on the internal memory (I use a 1gb sdcard for saving files):

• - LXDE (Includes a text editor, terminal, XScreensaver, Xarchiver, Music Player, wicd, etc)
• - AbiWord
• - Gnumeric
• - XPDF
• - Iceweasel (Debian's version of Firefox)
• - Icedove (Debian's version of Thunderbird, and I also installed the Lightning and Plaxo plugins)
• - Kompozer
• - Pidgin
• - VNC Viewer
• - RDesktop
• - VLC Media Player
• - Game Emulators (I keep the roms on the SDCard):

• - Stella (Atari 2600 emulator)
• - GNGB (Gameboy emulator)
• - snes9x (Super NES emulator)
• - Handy (Atari Lynx emulator)
• - XMAME
• - DGEN (Sega Genesis emulator)
• - DOSBox
• - (I've tried installing a few different NES emulators (FCEU, XMESS, MEDNAFEN), but they all run really slowly. This seems very odd to me because the DOSBox, SNES, Genesis, and Lynx emulators run perfectly. Any suggestions?)
• - Synaptic
• - SMBClient
• - apsfilter
• - FUSE
• - SSHFS
• - Java JRE 1.6.0
• - Flash

While I'm really happy with this setup, I am having four nagging problems:

1. The boot process sometimes gets stuck in a loop of some sort. Sorry, I should have copied the error message that scrolls endlessly up the screen. If I restart by holding the power button for 5 seconds, the problem usually corrects itself. But it's still aggravating and I'd love to learn what settings I can change to eliminate the error.
2. DebXO doesn't seem to recognize the built-in gamepad buttons on the XO. Since I like playing with emulators, I'd really like to learn how to get DebXO to recognize the gamepad and how to remap the buttons.
3. I cannot get the built-in webcam to work under DebXO. Judging from the messages I get during the boot process, the computer seems to recognize that the webcam is there, but no matter which webcam software I use I get one error message or another, saying that the webcam cannot be found or that the webcam is already in use.
4. DebXO doesn't support the XO's button that rotates the desktop, like when you want to read an ebook. Getting this button to work would be really nice, because I like to download books from Gutenberg and other free ebook sites.

I've posted questions on the OLPC forums and the OLPC News forums, but so far with no luck. Sadly, since so few XOs were sold in North America the user community is pretty small.

Sorry. No experience with a XO Netbook. Only acer aspire one and eee pc 900. Posting below links in case you are unaware of them. Always wanted a XO a while back when they first came out. Never got one though.

http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/

http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/802/jffs2/

http://lunge.mit.edu/~dilinger/debxo-latest/

http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4053.0

http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/private_rpms/

Grabbed a lot of this from below thread from this forum which I am a member of.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47337&

Update time:

1) I solved the problem with the gamepad buttons. DebXO does recognize the buttons, but I had to map the keys inside the emulator software I use, like XMAME or ZSNES.

2) I've managed to get the webcam working using MPlayer. I can take photos using MPlayer and a short BASH script I threw together.

3) There appears to be a script available to get the "rotate screen" button to work. I haven't tried it yet.

4) I still get stuck in the loop at startup from time to time. I've learned to live with it.

Also, I'm now using Google Chrome instead of Iceweasel, Sylpheed instead of Icedove, and GRDC as a frontend to RDesktop and VNCViewer. I've also got HU-GO for playing TurboGrafx-16 games.

The kids have Debian on theirs, still gets around 2- 2 1/2 hours battery life. I went the lazy way and bought
http://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/978

debian on a 8gb sdhc.

slackware.