[ale] Last Central Meeting/OLPC

[Charles Shapiro]

Hey, nice write-up!

We also demonstrated the music editor(s), all 4 of 'em, although I reckon I
was the only one really amused by my rendition of "Frere Jaques" in
cat-meows.  More detail than you can ever want is available on the OLPC wiki
( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home ), if you're interested. I should've been
clearer that you can download and run sugar on Fedora 7, gentoo, or ubuntu.
This is allegedly the "most pleasant" development environment. I understand
it's possible to run an emulator on other OSs but I've little interest in
exploring that. As shipped, the XO is running a stripped-down version of
Fedora 7.

I thought it was a lively meeting, and it seemed like most people stayed
awake. I'm waiting to see Aaron's video as soon as the pain and swelling go
down a bit.

-- CHS (Presenter)



On 1/19/08, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2008-01-19 at 12:43 -0500, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Everyone voted to disband and switch to Vista.
> >
> > Bwahahahaha!!!! I wasn't there either so I would like to hear about it
> > as well.
>
> It was interesting.  They passed around one of the OLPC units,
> demonstrated a great deal of the thing's functionality, and so forth.
>
> They had four units there and showed off some of the unique-to-OLPC
> networking tidbits, discussed the fact that system has a
> crypographically signed kernel, and more.
>
> Aaron had cameras there and was able to record the meeting.  I am not
> sure if those are going to be made available on the web site or whatnot.
> I would be pretty hard pressed to give blow-by-blow notes or anything
> like that, but I can summarize a bit of what I learned there:
>
>   * The people who created the OLPC believe (much like I do) that
>     software has grown to be too damn bloated.  The design of the
>     OLPC emphasizes functional but trim software that people can
>     use.
>   * A developer key is required to do many complex things with the
>     system, including use non-OLPC signed kernels.  I am not sure
>     just how I feel about that, actually, but looking at it from
>     the viewpoint of its target audience, I suppose this makes some
>     sense.
>   * The thing is durable; one of the units was tossed onto a desk
>     as one might toss an old college-ruled five subject down onto
>     the desk, and its owner didn't even flinch.  I suppose you can
>     get away with doing that with a device like this; I would probably
>     kill anyone that did that with my laptop computer.  :)
>   * It is lightweight.
>   * The user interface takes some getting used to.  It is extremely
>     non-traditional, though I can see how after using it for a few
>     days it would become easy.
>   * The system lacks a lot of the normal functionality of a typical
>     GNU/Linux box.  It does have up-to-date versions of what is there,
>     though, from what I could see in the few minutes that I had one
>     in front of me.
>   * It probably won't run Emacs.  At least not with all of the
>     bells-and-whistles (VCS and IDE functionality, for example).  I
>     made a comment about Emacs and someone replied that "If you got
>     a network of 23 of these things together..." :-)
>   * It doesn't have a file manager in the way that we normally think
>     about such things, though it will import data from and export data
>     out to USB keys and the like.
>   * You can use them to find out (within a line of sight, seemingly)
>     how far you are away from another person's OLPC.  It also seems
>     that you have to have the machines pointed at each other, and
>     you also have to give them a few seconds to get a distance reading
>     that is close to accurate.
>
> I am probably leaving out a great deal of things.  I wouldn't want to
> rush right out and get one to do my work on---hell, the thing won't even
> hold my home directory (but then again, neither will a USB stick or SD
> card)---and I would not want to try to typeset things on it, much less
> try to run OpenOffice.org on it to do homework.  However, it does fill a
> very much needed spot in a niche, and it is an innovative, not bad
> looking device that is responsive for its hardware specs.  I would like
> the chance to play with one more to learn more about it, but I don't
> have the money to be able to engage in such an encounter.
>
>         --- Mike
>
> --
> Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
> home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
> cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
> Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
>
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