using the stock OLPC kernel in F11/Rawhide

[Scott Douglass]

Friends,

It is possible to use the stock OLPC kernel which includes power
management, DCON and working audio drivers (at the least) with the
F11/Rawhide images that CJB is generating.

In theory, this gives you, now, a working XO laptop, and the latest
Sugar. And as an added bonus a really usable GNOME desktop and anything
else you can yum install.

In practice, Rawhide is so raw you can't get much benefit from this yet.

Here is the "howto". I've done all this on the NAND, after converting
from a "live" setup to a "dead" setup as per one of my previous messages
to this list...

1. install the latest Rawhide for XO image from:

http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/

2. by any means necessary install the kernel RPM from staging release
801. This can be found in the OLPC git repo:

http://mock.laptop.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=repos;a=blob_plain;f=RPMS/kernel-2.6.25-20090223.1.olpc.69098d87d56945c.i586.rpm;hb=local.8.2.1

Sorry for the long URL...

rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.25-20090223.1.olpc.69098d87d56945c.i586.rpm --force

3. copy /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25-20090223.1.olpc.69098d87d56945c
to /boot/vmlinuz1

4. make a backup copy of /boot/olpc.fth (e.g.
cp /boot/olpc.fth /boot/olplc.fth.backup)

5. edit /boot/olpc.fth, change the kernel to vmlinuz1 and remove the
entire line the ends in "ramdisk".

6. setup ohmd:
# yum install ohmd

7. Reboot
# init 6

End result, you can play audio/music on the text console (using aplay,
mpg123, flac123 etc), and you can echo into the devices to suspend the
XO (and hit the power button to come back from suspend)

e.g. to suspend:

echo mem > /sys/power/stat

In a GNOME session, we have mixed results.

You can enable "dim display on idle" in the gnome-power-preferences,
which is cool. Don't try to "suspend" from the gnome-power-manager
applet, that just kills your gdm/X session as far as I can tell. And the
Hibernate menu item does nothing at all. The brightness applet works
nicely.

Pulseaudio still doesn't detect the sound hardware.

Ekiga, set to use the direct alsa/hardware audio almost works... tried
the echo test and at least heard a voice before it crashes.

Note, I've not tested a Sugar session... will try that tomorrow.
G'night!