My Linux (OLPC XO) Experience

[tastewar]

I got my son's OLPC XO (1st generation) all updated, with a brand-new install. Then installed Wine. Then went to download minibloq, but there wasn't enough space. Fast forward a few days, after I acquired a SD card. I got the minibloq package onto the card, but when I would attempt to start it up in Wine, the machine would freeze. Did this 3 times. Then I wondered if we might be short on memory. I created a swap partition on the SD card and enabled that. At this point, minibloq would load. I plugged in the duinobot.kids board, found out where it got mapped, and created the link to COM1 under Wine. I selected the board and port, and loaded up the beating heart demo and attempted to load it onto the board. Some output was produced, but it was practically impossible to read, given how small the font was. I believe it was an avrdude sync error.

In short, it's pretty challenging getting the environment up and running on an (1st generation) OLPC XO. And I haven't yet been able to successfully program a board. I also tried my UNO, which IIRC came up as the same device in /dev, and got the same errors. I could at least tell there that programming the board was being tried, as I know what lights to expect to blink.

[Julian]

Hi, in our tests, the Arduino UNO worked with the XO+Fedora+Wine+Minibloq, but not the DuinoBot nor DuinoBot.Kids (sorry!, we did not solved that yet, but it's a problems between that board's drivers and Linux). Regarding the Arduino Uno, we tested the (if I remember well) on an XO v1.5.
Julián

[Julian]

Hi, yesterday we released the native Linux version of Minibloq:

http://blog.minibloq.org/2012/08/native-minibloq-for-linux-released.html

It's still an early Beta, so testing, comments ans ideas are very welcome...
Thanks!
Julián