Comments on: OLPC: Shipping a Beta?

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:59:20 +0000

Having participated and gotten a couple of these, from my playing and all my reading, its not as beta as you think, the hardware is pretty well debugged, the software on them on the other hand is beta (well something just short of a release candidate especially for the first world where we use encrypted routers, and expect basic debugging to have been done already,

By: gjward

gjward — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:41:24 +0000

My wife took advantage of the “buy one get one” program, so I've had a chance to use the OLPC. I also think it's a bit “clunky.” My biggest complaint is the mouse pad. As I slide my finger across the pag, the corresponding movement of the mouse pointer is, at times, rather “herky jerky” (for lack of a better term.

By: fredrik

fredrik — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:30:15 +0000

I have not used the hardware (only played with the virtual machine). But I would be interested in how the XO hardware would work with a lightweight “old school” desktop environment such as XFCE. Looking at the specs it seems to be in the same league as my old Win98 laptop.
I found it puzzling that the XO virtual machine is much less responsive than a full blown Ubuntu VM. Maybe it's because it's emulating a whole lot more. But if that's not the case and it's a just a software (Sugar) problem OLPC would be in a much better position to turn things around.

By: Shawn Wheatley

Shawn Wheatley — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:54:51 +0000

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was a little disappointed. I did participate in the G1G1 campaign, and haven't played with it much… mostly because I've been too frustrated when I have played with it. My main goal was a usable (even if it was slow) browser on a tiny machine. This seems too lofty of a goal, since I can't even get the laptop connected to my wifi access point. My secondary goal was to spend a few spare cycles working on Python code for the project. I fear I will spend those extra cycles fighting the machine instead.

I wish the project nothing but the best, and I hope they are successful in their attempts to educate the children of the world. However, as a busy father of one child, I feel my efforts are better spent elsewhere.