fractalnavel

this has been going on for far to long now.  i think i'm going to loose my mind.  it's having a negative affect on me.

and so on.  the correct words are "too" (two o's), "lose" (one o) and "effect" (e, not a).

i don't where all of this started, but it has got to stop.

and no, those aren't alternate correct spellings.  as you can see from the search links above, these issues have been brought up many times - but for some reason, a lot of people just don't get it.

there's a kind of ego-centric arrogance in internet society, especially among the younger groups, but in no way limited to them.  is prior art that hard to recognize or respect ?  as always, issues with "authority" are never simple.

i'm not talking about innocent typos here, although who knows, maybe that's where it starts.  meanwhile, guess what people ?  when you make these and other similar language errors, you come off as fucking morons.  right ? 

just thought you should know.

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was poking around the olpc wiki the other day for some reason or another.  oh that's right - it was the flash thing.  i was tired of not being able to view any flash items in the browse activity.  the xo uses exclusively foss, and the only option was a player that only did flash up to v8.  i had remembered from past year that there were other players that could be added after the fact.  turned out to be adobe's own.  oh well; if i have to.

while there, i noticed that the latest system build numbers have been creeping along.  last time i looked the latest version no longer included the original pre-packaged set of "activities"; instead, these had to be installed separately after an upgrade in a fairly clunky manner, requiring external storage devices, etc.  yuk.  but now, this has changed.  there's a control panel allowing one to install / update activities from an "activity group" that can be configured, in this case, for g1g1.

so i was like, what the hell, i'll try it.  supposed to be a non-destructive installation process that can be rolled back, as long as it's done the right way.  so after looking at the release notes, i proceeded.

and - as it turned out, it was a fairly smooth process.  a bit of a surprise there.  most technical things have their issues. but i rolled back anyway.  which was again fairly smooth, but there had been some changes. and now i had only 7% free space left - !

why roll back ?

• i didn't like the slightly new interface.  while the original was no champion either, this new one felt less useful.  you'd have to see them to compare - but there wasn't any explanation of this change immediately apparent in the wiki.  whatever happened to "what's new" sections ?  just me - i didn't look: 8.2 GUI and usability improvements.  eh, my fault.
• i could install and update activities from the control panel - but not remove them.  nothing will get listed there unless an update or new activity exists.  which kinda stunk, because about 160MB of crap in the default set of activities was a major contributor to to nearly filling the "disk" (flash memory).  returning to get rid of some things - oops - you can't.  and some of what is installed is considered to be "collections" - just content put together that is stored locally for offline use.  well, i had gone ahead and installed it all to see what the full experience was going to be, planning on getting rid of much of it later.  that's when i discovered the no-removal thing.  and then i discovered that there wasn't a good way of backing out collections.  have to do that from the command line, and then run other things to rebuild an index, etc.  nope, this isn't exactly documented (adding stuff is), have to pick up the pieces of this knowledge from various pages in the wiki.  i did remove the wikipedia "slice" activity, gaining back about 90MB, arriving at 85% disk use.
• so i tried the old stand-by, the "xo-get" activity that used to work for add / remove purposes - nope, no longer runs.
• hey, what happened to the "news reader" activity (rss) ?  after installing separately, discovered that this no longer runs either.
• i checked the various things i had played with at the linux system level (ntp, ftp, http, smb, wine, thunar, and all their dependencies, and more), and sure enough, they were all gone.  really, the only thing preserved in the update is one's history (the "journal"), and most of the /home/olpc folder.  some of the stuff in there changes, which was apparent after rolling back.  rolling back did restore all of those extras
• everything in /root was gone.  huh.  guess i should have expected that.
• after poking around, ok, there was some cool new little stuff & features, but nothing worth the update, really.  nothing worth redoing my other work, certainly.  i was hoping maybe for some holes to be filled, like the stripped out cifs kernel module finding its way back into the linux layer, but i didn't even bother to check.
• from my last playing, i had learned about the yumex package, a gui for the yum utility (think software installer / finder / updater).  the thing to do was start with that ("yum install yumex" - worked fine), then start installing my extras using yumex.  but i could never get it to load completely in the upgraded system - locked the box up, requiring a power-cycle.  resource shortages ?   not worth finding out.

other notes on the upgrade / rollback:

• 93% disk usage ?  really ?  yeah, i'm aware that a copy of the previous state is made during the update process.  lesson learned: clean out the current system before updating.  that will prevent all kinds of temporary files from becoming enshrined in the backup copy of the system.
• i did find where the old system copy was kept, and all the stuff i had changed / created was there.  of course, i would have to re-install the extra software (again) into the new system first.  see the yumex comment above, and also consider that there's not enough disk space left to do this.
• so, say one is satisfied with the new system - what's the "correct" way to clean up the backup copy ?  what happens during the next upgrade ?  this is getting ugly.  more explanation and guidance on these issues is needed.
• i guess i can still use the alternate boot process to go back and forth between the two images i have now.  but there are some things i would have to keep undoing / redoing in the /home/olpc area, or make other provisions for.
• yeah - rolling back - i now have some duplicate (really?  or new versions?) activity items, and duplicate "library" items.  something clearly wasn't completely thought through as they were changing how this stuff was stored, configured and backed up.
• so now i have two images that need cleaning up.  i guess just do each clean-up job while each system is active.  probably be able to clear up close to 200MB that way.

probably more stuff i can't recall today, but you get the idea.

and i'm glad i have my little additional programs installed.  can't really cut / paste the long magic command line incantations from the olpc wiki pages to any of the stock xo terminal windows, but i had installed "terminal" as part of my xfce toys - cut//paste works like a charm there.

oh - and that flash business ?  after rolling back i installed adobe flash, and removed the foss player (gnash).  it's like they warned: the xo really doesn't have the horsepower for flash video. well, at least i have the option now.