Sold on Open Office.org

penguin open office

That’s a figure of speech, of course, because Open Office is the FREE alternative to Microsoft Office.  I’ve been toying with it in Ubuntu on my XO laptop, and then installed it on my Mac G5 once I realized that X11 (the interface for Linux apps) came pre-installed on OSX 10.5.  I like that O.O. opens .doc and excel files, so I’ve been trying to migrate all my office tasks onto Open Office.

But two factors that I discovered today sold me ultimately on it, despite some conversion troubles.*

Continue reading “Sold on Open Office.org”

Xubuntu on OLPC

I finally went whole-hog and installed Xubuntu on my OLPC / XO laptop. I am too worn-out by the process to actually post screencaps or photos so I posted someone else’s!

Instructions that I followed are right HERE. I used the XO itself as the Linux box to create the SD card / format / partition it etc. I used my Mac G5 to download the torrent of the Hardy tarball and put it on a Fat32 USB drive.

Continue reading “Xubuntu on OLPC”

OLPC updates bugs / solutions

So, for those of you using the XO Laptop (the One Laptop Per Child Project), this might help you update cleanly.

I wanted to upgrade to build 711, the latest stable release, but I didn’t want all the kiddie / programming activities that come with the activity packs. I had some problems installing activities one at a time, and finally made Web 86 work after installing Firefox and Browse, both of which failed to start and seemed to prevent me from installing Web at first.

Continue reading “OLPC updates bugs / solutions”