First impressions and hacks to make it into a real machine
Jon Dreyer
xo arrived. As I am currently a student, I carried it around a
lot and was frustrated by the size. So naturally, being a
cheapskate, I wondered if I could use my xo to do some basic
workhorse stuff: Wireless networking, word processing,
spreadsheets, and pdf viewing are at the top of my list.
The short answer is that the hardware seems fine (though I'm
not crazy about the keyboard yet) but Sugar, though it's fun
and cute, has to go.
To be fair, Sugar is designed for 3rd world kids, not me, but
the basic problem with Sugar is that they discarded the whole
concept of a file and replaced it with the "journal." The
journal's big problem is that it's flat; it has no
directory/folder structure or any other structure. It's just
ordered by time. This would be ok if there were some
intelligent indexing going on, but AFAICT there isn't. I
plugged in my USB flash drive and the machine chugged away on
it for awhile and then presented all the files, from all the
directories, as one flat mess. Whether this model works for
3rd world kids or not, it won't work for me!
Luckily the OLPC people did not throw out the Fedora Linux
baby with the window system bathwater and it turns out you can
make the xo's Linux into something much more generic without
too much fuss if you know your way around Linux. Here's more
or less what I did.
Start with the latest stable XO build:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update
(That also turned out to be useful when I broke things
horribly; I just reinstalled the latest build.)
Then there's a decent desktop environment called Xfce:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xfce
That page also has instructions for installing WiFi Radar,
which you will need to use the wireless Internet without Sugar.
Once I did that, I had wireless connectivity. I brought up a
shell window and, as root, gave the olpc user a password (root
needs no password. Then I could ssh to the xo and do much of
this stuff with a real keyboard.
Download some familiar apps:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firefox
Note the warning about the repository file under "known problems".
After that, I started going wild with "yum install", e.g. (as
root):
yum install emacs
yum install openoffice.org-writer
yum install openoffice.org-calc
yum install evince
yum install openoffice.org-draw openoffice.org-impress
By the way, "yum list" is your friend; it'll tell you what's
available. I could never have guessed the syntax for the
openoffice stuff.
I still have 384M on the built-in flash drive.
What I would like to do is have the machine boot in text mode
such that if I log in as olpc I can bring up Sugar; if I log
in as jdreyer I can bring up xfce. I'd appreciate any clues.
Jon Dreyer
was none there, and that it was so easy to get it working:
Harry Forsdick
Your comments reflect my reaction to the XO, but from a different perspective. I don't have any illusions of me actually using the machine, but rather I try to put myself in the shoes of a kid trying to use the XO. The conclusion I am coming to is that it is underpowered for the sugar environment -- and if they don't try to do what the sugar environment is trying to do, there is almost no point in the Media Lab / Negroponte / OLPC being involved in this activity.
Although we all concentrate on the hardware and its unique characteristics (rugged, low power, all the devices built in, cheap), it's the software that is really unique -- and really the only reason the Media Lab, Negroponte and Seymour Papert should be involved in this endeavor.
The problem is that the hardware in underpowered for what they are trying to do. I have just tried running the XO emulator under VMWare on my laptop. It really flys on my laptop and now I can understand how it is supposed to work. I have heard people say that 3rd world kids don't have the same expectations as us first worlders. I think this is incorrect. The comparison as to whether the XO will succeed in the real world -- 1st or 3rd -- is how well it compares to human reaction speeds -- and the XO is not fast enough to not get in the way of human thought process speeds.
I'm not saying this is a bad machine: I wish I could buy something as small, rugged, lightweight with more memory, a faster processor and a larger keyboard: if I could, this would be a better note taking machine than anything I current have.
So, I suspect I will be doing most of my explorations on my XO emulation on my laptop which is probably closer to what the XO.2 or .3 will be like.
-- Harry
--
Harry Forsdick
781.861.6149 (home) | 781.799.6002 (cell) | http://www.forsdick.com | http://forsdick.blogspot.com | http://www.lexdig.com
Jon Dreyer
> small, rugged, lightweight with more memory, a faster processor and a larger
> keyboard: if I could, this would be a better note taking machine than
> anything I current have.
The Asus EEE PC may be most of what you are looking for,
though I don't know how rugged it is and its keyboard is
probably no bigger since the machine itself is slightly
smaller than an XO. But the keyboard is probably better
anyway, if less water resistant! Currently the most potent of
these, the 8G, has an 8G flash disk and 1M of RAM, at around
$500; another due in April should have better power
consumption and no fan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC
Then there's also the rumored "ultra portable" Macbook to come
out in a few weeks at MacWorld Expo in a few weeks, though
nobody seems too sure about the details.
Harry Forsdick
I don't happen to think that you have to be a 3rd world kid to need improvements in the way computers are used in the classroom. Although I don't think OLPC consciously thought about it, but 3rd world countries are probably easier to revolutionize the use of computers in the classroom than 1st world countries. I absolutely believe that the most important thing OLPC is trying to do is to develop a software platform that supports the ideas of Papert:
- Children (people) learn by working on projects
- Children (people) learn by working together with other learners
It's not about laptops, waterproof keyboards, $200 price tags. It's a continuation of a theme that Seymour Papert and Alan Kay have been promoting (correctly, I think) for years. Take 1 part Seymour Papert educational theory, 1 part Alan Kay dynabook platform inspiration and add 1 part Nicolas Negroponte energy, flair, and responsible showmanship and you get the OLPC initiative. It probably had to be named One Laptop per Child to get people's attention -- it wouldn't have sold if it were called One Software Learning Platform per Child.
So, although I am interested in understanding what the XO can do besides what it can do as shipped, I am much more interested in understanding whether the platform supports the education paradigms of Papert and Kay.
Of course, this is very difficult for us to judge by owning one of these XOs: half of the benefit comes from collaboration and even with the hack to join the wider jabber group, I have yet to smoothly collaborate with anyone else.
Has anybody else actually used this machine as it is intended to be used with respect to collaboration?
-- Harry
daveno...@comcast.net
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