[ale] Last Central Meeting/OLPC

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 10:54 -0500, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> 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.

I did think that was pretty amusing.  All in all the features of the
machine are pretty interesting, though I am admittedly more curious
about the hardware side of it in terms of how the acceleration for such
things (such as the sound and the graphics) are done.  I did not notice
any hiccups in the system the entire time that it was in use, either in
the demo machines or in the one that was passed around.  I thought that
was pretty impressive given the processing power and the memory.

>   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.

Understandable, because the XO does not seem like it would be a great
place to develop new software, given the overhead of things like
compilers and the like.  Then again, I have thought for quite a long
time that software developers should probably use the most under-powered
machines possible so that they are forced to use creative ways to make
software not be resource-hungry... but that is just a personal opinion.
Obviously, there are some types of software that are going to be
resource-hungry no matter what simply by the nature of how they work,
but I think that there are probably ways to trim down a lot of the
software that we use in our day-to-day lives.

> 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.

That is the only truly unfortunate thing that I have heard about it, at
least in my opinion.  I find it unfortunate that Fedora and Red Hat
still have not adopted the dpkg system.

> 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.

It was a good presentation, I think.  I learned quite a lot.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
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Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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