One laptop per man-child

[trochee]

I'm writing this on the bus with my new one-laptop-per-child device. it's bright green, and looks like a keroppi Japanese kid's toy, except for the qwerty keyboard. It's really cute and I've already had two people stop me on the street and ask "Is that one of those laptops-for-kids?"

biggest downside: keys are very small. my hands aren't huge, so it's not a show-stopper. It's also not exactly lightning-fast (hah!). Actually my biggest headache has been the wireless router at home, which still misbehaves with ipv6 DNS

It's also running a UI called "Sugar", which is (I think) gnome-derived, but is quite counter-intuitive for someone (like me) who is fully-acculturated in the model of desktop and command-line. On the other hand, it's a well-thought-out interface for someone who's never used a computer -- four "layers", representing "neighborhood" [network-connectivity], "group" [sharing and joint activities with another PC], "Activities" [applications active on this PC] and "Activity" [the current app]. All four layers are available via keyboard buttons, which is handy too.

It's not that hard to bring up a command-line, of course -- and under the sugar is a stripped-down specialist RedHat install. Apparently there's a how-to on "upgrading to Debian" but I'm willing to be gracious and give this RedHat/Sugar combo a chance. Also the OLPC project isn't supporting this hardware with Debian, so I'll hang on.

battery and wireless reception are flawless -- in addition, when I'm writing on the bus, as I am now, I can turn the LCD to reflective mode and the battery drain drops to near zero, since the big electric draws are wireless and the LCD bulb (or perhaps the speakers or CPU, but writing doesn't seem to need either of those).

Whee!

Comments

[lunacow]

Oo, very cool! And so the deal is that in buying one of these, you also paid for one to go to a child somewhere?

[caracola.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's so cute! Please have imtboo take beautiful pix of you and your new laptop and post! Post haste!


I am bossy.

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

I got one of those too, in a fit of credit-card-enabled techno-optimism. It came the day before I left, and I couldn't get it to recognize any of the wifi networks visible in my apartment, which made it mostly just frustrating. Also, I wanted the crank. But it is small and green.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

I just want a pink one.

Also I want to be more important than the laptop but that's going to be difficult , because the thing is damn cute. Now if only people would stop troke down the street and ask : "is this one of these French cute things ?"
Um. Nevermind. I don't think I want that now that I think about it.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

you will always be more important than the laptop.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

I knowwwww.
I was joking !
:)

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

That's probably what I wanted, too!

crank?

[https://id.mayfirst.org/dkg/ (from livejournal.com)]

I didn't know you were getting one of these!

Does it have the human-powered battery charger? That's the one piece of tech that's got me really excited coming out of the OLPC project.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

heh. I hope yours starts to co-operate. I also had some issues with the hardware clock going out of sync on every reboot -- the magic is:
$ su -
# /usr/sbin/ntpdate ntp.nasa.gov
# /usr/sbin/hwclock --systohc
# exit
and that seemed to solve it. The IRC support was excellent (I found it through the laptop.org wiki).

[trochee.livejournal.com]

i did. I have my doubts about the real benefits of this charity, but it's a nice idea. I don't get to decide where it's going though.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

heh. i think that will happen, but it may wait until after Christmas.

Re: crank?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

no, alas, it doesn't. I think it's quite promiscuous with respect to voltages, though, and it might be easy to find (or make?) one. I should ask around on the Seattle Dorkbot list.

[mythalethe.livejournal.com]

Very nice! I've been dreaming of a new MacBook pro, but this little box seems like a great compy with good social consciousness cred.