Many of you have probably heard of the One Laptop Per Child [http://laptopl.org] Program or seen their recent commercials for their GiveOneGetOne program on mainstream TV. Well I bit the bullet and decided to get one of these.

Costing $425 (which covers the cost of 2 laptops and shipping to myself), I think its going to work out pretty well. The machine is fairly modest, having only a 433 Mhz CPU, 256 MB of ram, and 1GB of flash rom (for a hard drive). What make this laptop so interesting is the rest of the design. It’s lcd screen was designed specifically for this laptop to be extremely friendly in the low power realm, its case is designed to seal well enough that children walking to and from school need not fear rainstorms and dust, and the battery can charge off of anywhere from 11 to 18 Volts. Add to this that it has built in wifi and an expansion SD memory card slot, and you have a pretty mobile friendly laptop.

One of the first things I’ll do when I get this is find some type of alternative charging source for it. The children that receive these will get some sort of hand crank which should give 10 minutes of use to every 1 minute of charging, but the purchasers don’t get this feature. I’ve already looked at several inexpensive solar cells but have yet to decide on one yet. Until then I’ll just be working on the software in QEMU and seeing what I can do!

Last year for Christmas my sister got me a copy of an old claymation video game from my childhood called Neverhood. Its a pretty fun puzzle type game, that I almost beat under VMWare on my Mac, but it was really too slow to really be playable and so I never finished it. Being an old game I figured it should run no problem under WINE. That wasn’t exactly true, but with a little help from this site ( http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=neverhood ) I was able to get it working. Now I just have to beat it.

I’ve seen this once before and couldn’t remember the exact package I needed to update, so I figured I’d make a post about it so I could find it easily if I came across this again.

Sometimes when emergeing new packages you will get an error like the following:

checking for perl… /usr/bin/perl
checking for XML::Parser… configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool
!!! Please attach the following file when filing a report to bugs.gentoo.org:
!!! /var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/work/xkeyboard-config-0.8/config.log
!!! ERROR: x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1 failed.
Call stack:
ebuild.sh, line 1621: Called dyn_compile
ebuild.sh, line 973: Called qa_call ‘src_compile’
ebuild.sh, line 44: Called src_compile
xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1.ebuild, line 49: Called econf ‘–with-xkb-base=/usr/share/X11/xkb’ ‘–enable-compat-rules’ ‘–disable-xkbcomp-symlink’ ‘–with-xkb-rules-symlink=xorg’
ebuild.sh, line 578: Called die
!!! econf failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
!!! A complete build log is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/temp/build.log’.

Thanks to this post on karakas-online.de, we can see that this probably really means that perl is unable to load the XML::Parser. You can run the following command at the command line to see exactly why that’s happening:

# /usr/bin/perl -e “require XML::Parser”

In my case this resulted in:

Can’t load ‘/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/auto/XML/Parser/Expat/Expat.so’ for module XML::Parser::Expat: libexpat.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at -e line 1.

And so, even though this package was already installed, I just remerged it, replacing what was there before like so:

emerge -av XML-Parser

After doing this, you should be able to continue your original emerge. I’m not sure what is happening to this package that requires you to do this, but it seems to fix the problem. *shrug*