1.    OLPC XO laptop

It’s one TINY laptop

 

In May, 2008, I bought one (off ebay, as the G1G1.1 ended Dec 31, 2007).

 

I’ve been getting to know Sugar and the underlying Fedora 7 system.

 

very slowly....

 

It’s small and cute. And very small. The rubbery-keyboard is less tactile than I thought (smoother plastic; I was expecting something.. grippier). But typing is possible. As on all laptops, I miss the function keys, but the 4 oddly-marked XO functions keys are handy for jumping around Sugar.

 

Some odd keys not currently used. See KeyBinding for more notes.

 

The pads at the sides are not used.

 

The mouse-sensor area can be jumpy; I need to get a mouse (or trackball, better for portability?). Would also be interested in a USB keyboard for tryout — loses portability, though.

 

 

I’m using Emacs, w3m (via emacs), Firefox, Sonata, and playing around some more. Toying with the Speech capabilities. Bought a Transcend 16gig class6 SDHC card, to replace my old 1 gig card. Upgrade to 703 has problems w/ SD cards, so holding off on the upgrade.... (July 21, 2008)

 

Have intermittent problems with the SDHC card — disappears at random. (This may have more to do w/ improper system shutdowns — the power problem I mention below.)

 

Power management is frustrating — it’s great to get so much out of the batteries, but when they’re low, it shuts down w/out warning. So if you’re running off the power cord, and the power cord falls out of the wall and you don’t notice it.... So it goes!

 

Apparently this has been improved in more recent updates... Need to update, and the SD card issue has been solved, I understand.

 

 

2.    About

- the machine
- the interface

 

 

See XO.Articles for... articles, etc.

 

3.    Wireless networking

June 5 - I lost wireless for a while. Found some threads in the forum, mainly.

 

Read to delete the nertworks.cfg file, which I did. no change.

 

Some known issue w/ USB sticks causing drop-out. I DID have a USB stick in place. removed, reboot - same problem. eventually came back. not sure why.

 

 

4.    One Laptop per Adult (configuration)

(original thread)

 

 

5.    Operating system(s)

the XO comes with the Sugar GUI, and Fedora 7 on the command-line. Some of the others below have been installed.

 

see also: Alternative OS

 

6.   Sugar - the GUI

see Sugar

 

6.1    releases

 

6.2    Fedora

After the 8.2 upgrade, it’s now Fedora Core 9

 

under the hood

 

 

7.    Hardware

 

 

7.1   power

 

8.    e-books

see EBooks

 

9.    Software

 

9.1    Freeciv

 

 

10.    Multi-media

see AudioVideo

 

 

11.    Programming and Development

see XO.Programming

 

 

12.    Shop

 

 

 

13.  See Also

StringCanPhone.100DollarLaptop
- the XO wiki

 

 

14.  Tags

scp xo olpc computers digital linux openSource

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