Kushal , kD & FOSS » OLPC

OLPC Pune meet and photo management

kd — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:28:22 +0000

This Sunday I went to OLPC Pune meet to give a talk on activity development. The students seem be very enthusiastic. The talk lasted for around 2 hours. Photos can be found here.

On the other side, I was looking for a photo catalogue software which can catalogue my photos on DVD or any other removable media, it should also allow me to search them based on EXIF data and tags and should show thumbnail(s) in the result.
I generally use digikam and gthumb too manage and view the photos. In digikam I never being properly able to catalogue photos on DVD (never tried on the last few updates) and gthumb is too slow in showing the thumbnail or full screen views for the large size photos I take. I prefer gthumb over over digikam to view the photos due to the simpler UI.

Finally decided to write my own app for this, which will *not* have any editing features, Gimp is the tool I use for editing. Watch this video (3.2MB) and please comment if the thumbnail creation / viewing is fast or not ?

How to install Soas on your regular box

kd — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:50:50 +0000

Soas (Sugar on a Stick) is a LiveUSB system with sugar on it. It is based on Fedora. You can carry it and boot anywhere as you want like any other live system. You can download the ISO from here.

I was using it on a Eee PC (4GB model), suddenly thought of installing it on the system.

The other Fedora based systems have an option on desktop to install on hard disk, but this system is running sugar so no desktop means no such option. From the #fedora-devel I found the command is “liveinst” which is part of anaconda.

So I installed anaconda ( #yum install anaconda ) and then used the command “liveinst” ( without quotes) , this will fire up the installer for you. Then go through like any other installation.
After finishing the installation I found X was crashing, tried with many different config but nothing helped. Finally decided to install gdm and gnome on that box ( #yum install @gnome-desktop gdm ), also installed system-switch-displaymanager using which I changed the display manager to gdm. Next task was to change the init to 5 in inittab. Rebooted and found gdm , chose “sugar” as the desktop option and logged in :)

If you want any help come to #sugar on freenode.

OLPC XO(s) are on Free software only

kd — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:32:22 +0000

If you think in the other way, please read this blog post.

On a sidenote: I released a new version (v4) of Jukebox-activity with bn_IN translation.

Jukebox activity v3 released

kd — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:41:23 +0000

This new version is having .pls playlist file support, so with proper plugins you can play internet radio stations.

More details can be found here.

Want to play your favourite song/movie on OLPC ?

kd — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:54:37 +0000

So, if you want to play your favourite song/movie on OLPC use Jukebox.activity. Started working on this for the last few days after Sayam pointed me to the activity. It was almost in a stagnant condition.

My PyQt mind was someway different than writing this PyGtk stuff :) Sayam helped a lot.

The following features added as of now:

Full Screen option
Volume Control support
Supporting m3u playlists
Internet radios through m3u files.
Next/Previous buttons , if you open a playlist with more than one song

Will do a formal release within this weekend. I have a .xo file ready for testing. Please provide your feedback :D

If you want to start writing your own activity , start from this.