A Child's View of the OLPC

Finallyjoined!!! sends us a BBC account of a dad who traveled to Nigeria and brought back an XO laptop for his 9-year-old, Rufus. Here is Rufus's review, a child's view of OLPC. "Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored. Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination... With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time."

Re:Already?

[morgan_greywolf]

I believe there's a pilot in Nigeria underway. Here's another person from Nigeria's view of the OLPC [olpcnews.com].

Re:Something smells...and it aint my pants

[ThinkingInBinary]

The XO laptops connect through a school Jabber server, so if his laptop was set to use the same Jabber server, then he could see all of the people at that school, even if he's not on their local wireless network.

BBC reporter

[fishter]

The Dad is Rory Cellan-Jones [bbc.co.uk], a seasoned BBC reporter on technology. A better link (with pictures) is here BBC News [bbc.co.uk]

Re:Something smells...and it aint my pants

[Scarblac]

Apparently it's easy to use them to connect to WiFi networks, his dad already ran one, and then you can apparently join OLPC chat rooms over the normal Internet. Not really the same as directly connecting to other OLPCs.

Re:How long will that one work?

[ThinkingInBinary]

First, the target markets are not all African schools. They have target countries on other continents as well. (Off the top of my head, I know there are several in South America.)

Second, it's not an automatic kill switch. It allows you to disable the laptop if it is reported stolen, and will disable the laptop if it hasn't been able to check with the server for a certain time period. If the laptop is properly configured with a school server, then (even across the Internet) it will still be able to maintain its lease, and it won't shut off.

there's a video of his review with it in his hands

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/business/video/138000/bb/138961_16x9_bb.asx [bbc.co.uk]

or

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7140000/newsid_7140600/7140604.stm [bbc.co.uk]

Re:Emulator?

[Breakfast Cereal]

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/News [laptop.org]

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:

  give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
  support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
  provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/ [rohrmoser-engineering.de]

as: XO-LiveCD_.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/ [skolelinux.de]

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

[e-mail]. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf [skolelinux.de]

Re:Emulator?

[ThinkingInBinary]

It runs a customized, stripped-down version of Fedora Core 7 (details here [laptop.org]). There isn't an "XO emulator", but since it's s standard x86 system, you can emulate an XO [laptop.org] using Qemu, VMware, Virtualbox, or another virtualization program. (It's not perfect, but it is close enough to see how the system works.)

Re:Emulator?

[Atzanteol]

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation [laptop.org]

Enjoy. It's a modified RedHat distro with a special WM called Sugar.

Another Kid's Review

[richg74]

On his blog, Freedom to Tinker [freedom-to-tinker.com], Prof. Ed Felten at Princeton has two more reviews of early versions of the XO laptop, the B2 [freedom-to-tinker.com] and the B4 [freedom-to-tinker.com], both (very well) written by a 12-year-old neighbor.

Re:How long will that one work?

[Tacvek]

Normally nothing else. But here is the main thing. Any student can request a developer's key. Once they have a developer's key they have full control over the computer and could disable the security system entirely. Now, how does one prevent a thief from requesting the key? Well to quote the spec: "The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time." To see the whole OLPC security specification see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost [laptop.org] especially the "P_THEFT: anti-theft protection" section.

Re:How long will that one work?

[Penguinisto]

Err, only if it's enabled by the computer's owner. That's the big diff... the XO DRM is a user option (like Lo-Jack for laptops), while WGA/DRM is a vendor's option (and is always on whether you like it or not, unless you use EULA-violating tools to disable it).

So conceptually you have a point, but practically you're way off base.

/P

Re:Something smells...and it aint my pants

[Mr. Underbridge]

Can't it be both?

Probably not.

if ((pants) & (!pants)){

printf("This code will never run\n");

}

You didn't miss it

[Trebuchet]

The program was extended to Dec 31, according to the web site.

http://www.laptopgiving.org/ [laptopgiving.org]

promo

[itof500]

I believe the G1G1 promo for the OLPC was continued until 12/31. You can still get one.

duke out

Re:Here we go again

[bcrowell]

I know a chemistry professor at the school where I teach who's an Ethiopian immigrant, and he used to organize textbook donation drives every few years. People would give him books, and he would send them to Ethiopia. He eventually stopped doing it, however, because it was too difficult to get the books to the students due to political corruption. Assuming the OLPC machines really do get to the kids (rather than being sold to enrich politically connected adults) in places like Nigeria, a big advantage would be that it would give the kids direct access to books that can't easily be interfered with.

OTOH, I maintain a catalog of free books (see my sig), and AFAIK there is essentially nothing out there as far as free elementary school books, and almost nothing for high school either. I do know of a South African project to produce a high school physics text (http://www.fhsst.org/), for example, but the project seems to have been moving along extremely slowly. Something like Wikibooks would seem like a natural vehicle for creating such books (ease of use + ease of translation), but Wikibooks has turned out to be a failure at its original goal of producing university-level textbooks (much better at producing gaming guides). In general, I don't think group authoring has been at all successful as a model for creating free textbooks. Authoring by an individual teacher scratching his/her own itch has been much more successful, but virtually all of that activity has been (a) in English, (b) in rich, industrialized countries, and (c) at the university level.

[OT] In South America

[Anonymous Coward]

In my country, the minimun salary is about US$300. Do you think that is a good idea to buy this, instead of spend it on something more useful?
I think that this is only for increase the external debt of poor countries. Only see who is promoting this.
Sorry for my english, i'm from South America. (Indeed, America != USA. Remember it ;) )