Xbuntu And Sugar Booting Sweet

So I got Xbuntu running on Tuesday morning, but there was a problem. I was only able to boot into it successfully once. I kept getting errors about the filesystem being the wrong type, which was crap because fdisk confirmed that it was Linux (83), and the boot would quit with "Unrecognized program format."

So, for a couple of days I just didn't reboot.

But today I have a swanky solution. I used koolkat's uber bootloading script but instead of replacing the one on the card I replaced the olpc.fth on the nand, going on the hunch that if the firmware could see the nand first it wouldn't later have issues with the SDHC card. Well, the hunch paid off, and I can now boot into Xbuntu or Sugar without issues.

So, how's Xbuntu turning out so far? It's noticibly faster, or at least Firefox is. I recall reading a post somewhere that said that the WiFi speed was hobbled down to 2 Mb\s in Sugar, so maybe that's why. Also, it's great to have windows again! So far I've used Synaptic to install Abiword (where I'm writing this right now), VLC, and a few other things. I actually used it to install OpenOffice Writer, but its load time made me hungry so I'm going to use Synaptic to uninstall it.

Next up will be to enable screen reorientation under Xbuntu. I've read about scripts that will handle it but that the keybinding for the rotation key wasn't known. Hopefully somebody has figured that out by now.