Getting One

So I decided to try an experiment, and participated in the G1G1 (Give 1, Get 1) program from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project.

My 4 year-old is the original target market for the purchase, and I know from experience as the computer geek in the family, (and most of the extended family – sigh), that I would be the primary fount of knowledge for the users of our OLPC. One of the sections of this review will be about how to find out more about the laptop and interface.

It Actually Arrived

The OLPC project emailed me about the 20th of December or so saying in effect that they wouldn’t be able to get the laptop to us in time for Christmas Eve, and included a link to a little card that you could print out to put in the child’s stocking so they wouldn’t be completely disappointed. An old hand at things like this, (can you say RSN? aka Real Soon Now?) I made sure the family knew it was on it’s way but by no means guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. It was a very pleasant surprise to have the UPS guy hand it to me at about 1620 on the 24th.

By unanimous decision among the adults in the family, (translation: my wife insisted) we put a bow on the OLPC package and put it under the tree for Christmas morning, instead of tearing it open and beginning to geek out with it during prime “First Life” time.

First Impressions

Next day, out it came. My daughter unwrapped it and we decanted the laptop to the couch to play with it. At first glance, it looks like a very small version of the Mac clamshell laptops. (A while ago I saw someone walking through an airport carrying what appeared to be a Josie and the Pussycats lunchbox, which upon inquiry was a peach/white Mac “toilet seat” clamshell laptop. I promptly made a a note to never buy and carry one of those.)

I can attest to it’s sturdiness, my daughter promptly dragged it off the couch by it’s power cable in her excitement to show Mom, to zero negative effect.

There was minimal amounts of packaging and a small gate-fold brochure suggesting I go to to the www.laptop.org/quickstart site for more information. Other than that, the laptop and power cable were the sole occupants of the box. The Documentation (which I will cover elsewhere) is excellent, clear and well thought-out.

Unless you’re a Windows apologist or have been living in a media-free environment (cave) you’ve probably seen at least a picture of one of these by now. The hype cycle this has gone through was sort of like the run-up to the movie “Snakes On a Plane”, only the OLPC XO laptop is actually good…..

OLCP XO’s are a well-made and attractive little machine, green and white for ours, and it didn’t take my daughter longer than 10 seconds to get it opened and find the power button, everything is made to be easy for children to operate.

Bootup and Running

Booting took a couple of minutes, with a unique indicator that was like a little man rotating his arms around a clock from 6:00 back to 6:00 completing the bootup. Once the bootup is done, the Sugar interface popped up and my daughter promptly opened at least 5 programs, resulting in a very slow experience for the first 5 mins or so.

The machine isn’t the speediest, which I understand completely, it’s not meant for AutoCad or 3D-rendering, it’s designed to be use the least power possible so the battery lasts a long time, which same it accomplishes well.

Note: For the sake of the grownups in the house, go get a $14 USB Keyboard, the built-in keyboard’s little keys are obviously designed for children, I can’t touch type on it no matter how I try. My Logitech USB Keyboard and Mouse combo worked right away, making geeking with the XO a lot more pleasant for big folks.

Once the programs have run, or are running, it’s easy to use them, some caching is done, apparently. As I said above, the keyboard is really small, but it’s extremely durable and made for little children hands, even waterproof and dustproof.

The Interface

A lot has been written already about the Sugar interface, it’s definitely different and for someone whose on his 8th major Operating System, it takes a little getting used to. First off, there’s a little wheel in the middle of the interface, with the little XO guy/gal in the middle, and hovering your mouse over that depiction pops up a menu that has the name of the laptop and below a separator selections for restart, shutdown and register.

The menu for applications, sorry, “Activities” is at the bottom, and that brings me to a peeve about the interface, whenever you move the mouse to the margins, mostly at the top of the screen, the Activity margin appears, occluding about 1/2 an inch of the sides and 2/3 of an inch of the top and bottom with an uber-menu.

This is very disconcerting to me, and causes children who aren’t yet very dextrous with the interface to suddenly end up in another program altogether, or unable to continue using the current one. There’s gotta be a setting to turn that damned thing off, but I haven’t found it yet.

Note: I found it, just needed the right search term. Here is how to disable the pop-up of the frame when the mouse hits certain areas on screen.

Overall, from receiving it to using it that first day or so, it’s a very intriguing interface that runs on a marvel of engineering, and I’m looking forward to working with it more. I can forgive it (just barely) for not currently running a SUSE version, watch this space for more on that….

Enough for now, Happy New Year and more parts to the review later this week.

Enjoy,

RossB

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