I have a setup that I'm quite pleased with on my Ubuntu machines, so I recently installed Ubuntu to my XO-1, thinking that I would get more out of the machine than I have with Sugar/Fedora. I bought a 4GB SD card to use with the machine and followed these instructions, which call for installing to a disk image within Qemu and then copying that disk image to an SD card.
I installed an alpha of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 without any major hitches. It works. I'm using Openbox as my window manager, which keeps touchpad use to a minimum.
Some remarks on what hardware works out of the box, with Ubuntu Intrepid:
- Wireless works.
- Display works. According to glxinfo it is doing direct rendering. glxgears runs at a whopping 22 frames per second.
- The brightness and volume keys don't work out of the box. The volume keys ("F11" and "F12", really) can be configured through GNOME. I do not know whether there is a quick way to get GNOME to also recognize the brightness keys ("F9" and "F10", really).
- X recognizes the game keys but not the rocker.
- The touchpad works, but is hyper-sensitive and registers taps all the time when you are using it. To disable tap-to-click, add a line reading options mousedev tap_time=0 to your /etc/modprobe.d/olpc.conf.dist. (Source)
- The microphone light is on all the time. I wonder if this is causing some power drain I don't want (apart from the light itself).
- Cheese does not recognize the webcam.
- Ubuntu does not know how to suspend-to-RAM the machine. It claims to be able to hibernate, but I haven't actually tried it.
It's a little poky, but more than adequate for using Emacs, reading mail, and browsing the web.
