One Laptop Per Child News

While thinking about some of the recent stories on the over-hyped Windows XP on the XO I realized how ridiculous it seems for anyone to get excited about an operating system released in 2001. An operating system that is the successor of Windows ME!

So instead of going down memory lane and mocking Microsoft I decided to compile a little overview of a cutting edge Sugar demo that I was shown when I was at OLPC HQ in Cambridge, MA some weekends ago. The demo setup was prepared by Alex, an intern at OLPC, and its goal is to show off some of the cool features that you can get to use on your XO when you spend some time tweaking the thing.

It is based on the latest joyride builds which include a significant redesign of both the home and neighborhood view. If you're running the faster builds you'll also notice significantly shorter activity startup times!

On the home view the running activities have moved into the edge on the top, the lower edge now contains the wifi and battery monitor (which tells you how much time you have left) and a volume control panel (finally!). The ring in the center is now customizable and users can select which of their installed activities should show up there.

Here's a list of currently installed activities. Your favourite / starred items will show up on ring on the home view.

The home view on my newly-installed XO is slightly less crowded than on the the demo-machine.

The most obvious improvement on the neighborhood view is that mesh-networks are now visually different from regular access points. Very useful for the black-and-white mode.

One of the highlights for me is the maps activity which is basically a Sugarized interface to Google Maps. Very cool indeed!

Opera...

...and Firefox running on the XO.

A cool physics demo.

Additionally an MPEG-4 version of Elephants Dream was shown running on the XO thanks to the power of MPlayer (OLPC News Forum has simple installation instructions).

Overall I have to say that I'm very impressed by the improvements that Sugar has seen over the past few months. While it may take some time for them to trickle down into the stable builds it's great to see into what general direction things are moving. Personally I'm currently running faster 2056 and it's a relatively smooth ride so far with the notable exception of 'record' not working. And as much as I love 'record' the improved activity startup time alone more than makes up for this loss.

Disclaimer: You will need a developer key in order to run unsigned software builds on your XO. Additionally running unsigned and potentially unstable software builds can lead to data-loss and is not recommended unless you know what you're doing. You have been warned.

Tags: Battery Monitor | Firefox | Google Maps | MPEG-4 | MPlayer | Opera | Sugar | XO Activities |

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Sadly, some would say, we now have a dual boot XO. Gizmodo has just released a video of the XO laptop booting both the Linux-based Sugar and the Microsoft Windows XP operating systems.

Congratulations to One Laptop Per Child developers, as this was a software feat. As Wilson Rothman says:

To get both operating systems to run, the BIOS has been modified to behave more like standard PCs (rather than Macs or Linux machines). The original BIOS for the XO was originally conceived for AIX and Solaris servers, all running variants of UNIX.

While OLPC should be all proud of themselves for the accomplishment, Microsoft should be ashamed of their earlier "massaged" XP on the XO video. According to Michail Bletsas via Wilson, XP takes a little over a minute to boot up on the XO, not the 4x faster time promised by Bohdan Raciborski's video.

Stepping back to look at the big picture, I still have to agree with Peter Simpson on this achievement:

"[XP] seems a little slow to boot"

That's got to be the understatement of the year! So they had to change the BIOS from LinuxBIOS to something that XP could deal with, and rewrite XP...and it still takes twice as long to boot.

Perhaps this should be an indication that XP might not be the best choice for an OS for the XO?

Perhaps OLPC should be focused on perfecting Sugar, a design breakthrough developed expressly for children to learn with. Not business process software designed for adults. Again, the whole concept of Windows XO is a OLPC marketing flaw and distracting to both the target audience, children, and the stated mission of the whole OLPC enterprise, education.

Tags: BIOS | Dual Boot | Gizmodo | Michail Bletsas | Microsoft | Sugar | Windows XO | XP on the XO |

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I've been happily running the cutting edge "faster" builds over the last couple of days to see how the most recent improvements, especially when it comes to the re-design of the Sugar UI, are coming along (more on this topic soon). At the same time OLPC is also very busy working on the 8.1.1 (build 708) bugfix release. Among other things power-management has received some more attention, security has been improved and the pen tablet (stylus mode) can now be used to move the cursor.

In order to facilitate widespread testing of this release candidate OLPC has made a signed version of it available, therefore allowing everyone, not just people with a developer key, to thoroughly test this build. In an e-mail to the developer's mailing-list Michael Stone wrote:

Next, PLEASE SHOUT if you experience a regression in connectivity from 65x to 70x. (We've got another G1G1 visible on the horizon and we'd really like to know about connectivity problems as soon as you can tell us.) If you wish to help perform this testing (or to verify the fixes for specific issues), please record your results at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_5

Especially when it comes to connectivity OLPC can't possibly test and evaluate all the routers and firmware versions out there, an in-house approach is simply not that scalable. So tapping the community as a testing resource allows OLPC to gain a much broader understanding of potential issues which can then be addressed. Finding these issues in advance has a direct impact on all XO users, regardless whether it's a G1G1 donor in North America or a child in Peru.

See Michael's e-mail, read the 8.1.1 release notes and record your results here to contribute to OLPC and help all of us using an XO by testing this build!

Tags: Michael Stone | OLPC | Sugar | bugfix | developer | software | testing |

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This is the second part of Walter Bender's "Confessions of a Fundamentalist".

"Free as in speech"

The ideals and methods of collaboration and critique embodied in the culture of free software can be a powerful force in the culture of learning. Such a transfer of culture could greatly enhance the education industry and its ability to engage teachers and students: empowering them with both the freedom to act and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning and in fostering economic development; unleashing that is an important part of the mission. It is not about debugging software, it is about the culture of debugging. FOSS can serve as a means towards the goal of constructionist learning.

By way of example, in Nigeria there are anywhere between 300 and 500 local languages, depending upon which metric you use. The official language of Nigeria is English, but English is at best the second or third language for most Nigerians—rarely is it their first language. In an early deployment of one-to-one computing in a school in Abuja, the children were initially frustrated that there was no spelling dictionary for Igbo, their first language. However, they discovered that they could build their own spelling dictionary. Not only were they able to satisfy this specific need, they discovered in themselves the power of harnessing tools toward their own ends. (In contrast to the FOSS experience, it is only within the last few months that Microsoft has offered Office in Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa, the three majors languages of one of the wealthiest, most populous country in Africa.)

Tags: FOSS | Live-CD | OLPC | Sugar Labs | Walter Bender | activity | education | fundamentalist |

Confessions of a Fundamentalist, Continued | Comment (5) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

For the past 30 months, I have been part of an effort to bring about a global transformation of education through the provision of connected "ultra-low-cost" laptop computers; computers that will provide an agency through which to positively impact learning, and consequently, everything that learning impacts, in particular, economic development. This work has been about giving children who don't have the opportunity for learning that opportunity: it is about access; it is about equity; and it is about giving the next generation of children in the developing world a bright and open future. It is predicated on the fact that children lack opportunity, not capability:

1. High-quality education for every child is essential to provide an equitable and viable society

2. A connected laptop computer is the most powerful tool we have for knowledge creation

3. Access on a sufficient scale provides real benefits for learning because critical mass is necessary to establish a sustainable community.

Tags: FOSS | OLPC | Sugar Labs | Walter Bender | education | fundamentalist | learning | open-source |

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One Laptop Per Child has finally released Update 1, which is based on build 703, itself released in March. But before XO laptop users in North America get too exited, this build still needs a G1G1-friendly one-step installation tool. Or as Michael Stone says:

If you're trying out 703 or 708 for the first time, please read the Update.1 release notes:

OLPC Update 1 Software Release Notes

Please!!!

With that stern of a warning, and the memory of my XO laptop repairs fresh in my memory, I'm going to wait till the more intrepid hackers make a easy install for me.

Tags: G1G1 | OLPC | One Laptop Per Child | Release Notes | Sugar | Update 1 | XO Laptop |

Sugar Update 1 Released, Caution to G1G1'ers | Comment (12) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

While reading one of the hundreds of e-mails related to OLPC that I’ve been finding in my inbox these past few days I realized something: When we’re talking about “Sugar” everyone seems to have a different idea of just what it is. Obviously the lack of a clear understanding of “Sugar” make every discussion about it that much harder. There are several different perceptions of what “Sugar” is or at least should be. The three most popular ones seem to be:

(1) Sugar is the User Interface. It’s all about the UI and how information is presented to the user. It’s also a tailored UI in that it’s very much adapted to the target user group, children, instead of the jack-of-all-trades software solutions that we’re used to.

(2) Sugar is really the technology developed for OLPC. It’s the underlying services used on the XO such as collaboration, the presence service, the data store and so on.

(3) Sugar is the overall user experience on the XO. It’s been argued that Sugar really is the combination of both the UI and the underlying technologies and that separating one entity from the other would break the whole concept.

Here is my (slightly philosophical) take on the situation: Sugar is a “gravitational force” when it comes to developing software, content and services for educational purposes.

Tags: Moodle | OLPC | Steve Jobs | Sugar | gravitational force | innovation | software |

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A friend wrote to me and asked, "Please tell me your opinion about the future of OLPC. " That would be a book, or possibly an encyclopedia. Here is a short version.

Education plus communication is the key to ending poverty, by giving students the means and the opportunity to get real jobs, and more importantly, to create new jobs connected to the global economy. Good education offers much more than that, including the ability to think for oneself, and good education was the professed goal of the project.

Nicholas Negroponte deserves a lot of credit for taking these ideas as far as he has, but he also has many failings, particularly in not communicating with the project volunteers or the public. He has driven out some of the project's best people, who are starting a complementary organization, Sugarlabs.org, to try to do many of the things that OLPC does not do, or does wrong:

Tags: General Public License | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC Future | One Laptop Per Child | Sugar Labs |

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While the brave are updating to the newest build candidate-703, those waiting for the full Update 1, might want to check out the new Sugar designs. There you can get a taste of what the new Sugar may look like: Just for fun, I juxtaposed this new Sugar UI with Alexandre Van de Sande's Aquatic Sugar: The Children's Interface, Translated for Adults on the OLPC News Sugar Forum and had an interesting response.

Tags: Aquatic Sugar | Christopher Blizzard | Datastore | Global Desktop | OLPC Sugar | Red Hat | Sugar User Interface |

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