OLPC Chat Activity Scroll Bug Fixed

The more I use my new OLPC XO laptop the more I find myself using the Terminal Activity to modify and add new features.  I’m no Linux guru but with some good examples it’s not hard to understand.

Last week I posted information on how to expand your neighborhood and find others to play with and chat. Unfortunately, the Chat activity suffered from a bit of a scroll bug. You’ll still find many other activities that are shared and can be a lot of fun.

The folks who have been working on the open source programs included with the laptop have been hard at work, even over the holidays. A fix had been posted so you can enjoy chatting with other new XO laptop users.

Close any Chat Activity you have open
Launch your Terminal Activity and enter the commands below.

• su
• cd /usr/share/activities/Chat.activity/
  ( Chat.activity is case sensitive )
• mv chat.py chat.py.old
  ( This renames Chat.
     If you have problems you can rename the .old one back )
• wget http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/chat.py

No Reboot required. Just look for a shared chat in your neighborhood.

Special thanks to Morgan Collett.

Using the Chat Activity isn’t the only way to chat with other new G1G1 participants. You can also download the xoIRC activity and chat in one of the OLPC support IRC rooms. Go to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XoIRC for more information.

The main documentation for the OLPC XO laptop continues to be The OLPC Wiki. The information there is dynamic and is being updated daily. I recommend visiting often. If you don’t find an answer to your question today, it may be there tomorrow.

 

 

Expand your Neighborhood and Chat

My thanks to Tom Hoffman who has created a virtual machine to test the internet share services of the XO laptop and Sugar interface. Thanks also to the good folks at OLPCNews for pointing me to the instructions below. They really make me wish I had jumped on board the XO bandwagon a year ago.

I’m not sure I understand how it all works yet but the result is a great demo of the power of the XO laptop. Even though I have two XO’s myself it’s great to chat with other new supporters of the OLPC project.

My new XO Neighborhood

I’ve only run into the nicest people but obviously I don’t recommend this for unsupervised kids. To expand your neighborhood use the following steps:

• Step 1: Launch the Terminal Activity and enter the following commands.
• Step 2: sugar-control-panel -g jabber
• Step 3: sugar-control-panel -s jabber xochat.org
• Step 4: Reboot Sugar with CTRL-ALT-ERASE

If you see an open Activity, just click to join. There is still one problem with the chat activity. The default build has a bug so soon after you start to enjoy your chat the screen scrolls all the way up each time a new chat message is sent. If you want to see everyones chat you’ll need to keep scrolling up. Very annoying but worth it for now. I have already had some experience rebuilding my XO so when a new build is available I’ll provide instructions.

My first XO Chat Experience

A tip to those who haven’t received their XO laptops yet. When you first boot you’ll be asked for a user name. The name will be displayed in the neighborhood so pick something that you want others to see. I like folks who included their location, but if your child will be using it, don’t include their last name.

UPDATE: The following comment was posted on January 7th

Please be aware that the xochat.org server is now very overloaded - I see lots of networking retransmits and people are often not visible. The load is proportional to the product of the number of registrees times the current number of users, for the reasons documented at XMPP_Extensions. So don't connect (and thus automatically register) unless you will really be contributing, and/or set up your own ejabberd server. -Neal McBurnett