Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.
This post originally appeared on opensource.sfsu.edu and is reposted here with Sameer Verma's permission.
55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital dependencies and building a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards. In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP on these very machines.
Sugar's new Home-View
So, let's do a quick comparison:
Sugar is built on top of Fedora 9, the current and cutting edge version of Linux from RedHat, which then in turn creates its commercial platform based on Fedora releases. So, with Sugar, you get fresh code. Windows XP is from 2001. I was much younger then and had no grey hair. Even at that, it is some specialized version of XP that you can get only if you are a third worlder. Its called Windows XP UP where UP stands for Unlimited Potential. Unlimited potential for whom? The users or the company? XP is no longer sold in the US, so the revenue er, I mean "potential" has to come from someplace else.
Sugar provides an environment for native collaboration. Native, as in innate. Inborn. Coded in the DNA. You can play games together, write a letter collectively, take pictures, and share in a couple of seconds. With XP UP, you'll have to get those at an extra from somewhere...if someone actually sells software like that!
With Sugar, everything you do is automatically saved in a journal so that you can recall it later. XP UP? No such luck.Be happy if it doesn't lose your files (I speak from experience).
Green Screen of Death anyone?
Child-friendly? Kids love Sugar. I've seen it myself, and so have the Nepalis, Peruvians, Uruguayans, Indians, Nicaraguans, and many more communities. XP? Even grown ups have trouble liking Blue Screens of Death.
I usually pass on Microsoft bashing. I haven't used their products for a very long time. But in this case, I have two problems:
The XP UP option brings with it MS Office (or so I hear) and so we have a production-oriented operating environment shrunk on a small laptop for 5 year olds. How vocational! The hope is that they will grow up into software labor. If you take a look at Sugar, you'll notice that its all about learning, exploring, and discovering. No wonder it brings the child out in many of us.
Malware is at its peak. We get junk mail every day. Thankfully, my systems don't get touched because...well they just aren't ripe for infection. But, imagine a legion of laptops around the world, running an outdated system that remains unpatched at best, spewing malware! There is a reason why such systems are called zombies! Do I really want that barrage of junk in my Inbox everyday? Do we really need help in that department from thousands of XO laptops gone XPUP?
No, Thank you!!!
Now, I'll get of my rant horse and do some real work. Time to get the Software Freedom Day flyers printed and uploaded. Let the masses make the decision. We report, you decide ;-)
Sameer Verma is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at San Francisco State University and organizes the monthly OLPC-SF meetups.
Despite the impression that Microsoft "massaged" the Windows XO video let's for the moment presume that the video was simply edited a bit oddly, and that the demo was the state of the art, XP on XO performance.
Did you watch it closely, while taking copious notes about XP on the XO performance? Well, I'm enough of a geek that I did. And the results are not pretty.
James Utzschneider and Bohdan Raciborski walked us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO, showing off a few common tasks - the general OS, recording and playback of audio and video, power management and the ebook mode, and document sharing.
XP on the XO
Microsoft starts with its "good news" that XP boots faster (but not four times faster) than Sugar; (1:05 into the video). Good going, folks. First off, it turns out that XP doesn't boot that much faster, as the scene only shows a boot to user login, not to the full user interface.
Worse, Microsoft had to cram in an SD card to make XP and Office work. The OS (and MS Office as well, I presume) are resident on the SD Card; from James' blog, emphasis added:
As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast."
Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.
Having the operating system on an SD card makes it really difficult to upgrade to a larger SD card (or replace a broken one), view photos from a camera, or share documents using an SD card instead of a USB key.
Sugar and other Linux versions on the XO do take longer to boot; but once the suspend and hibernation features are completely working (and the current Update.1 Release Candidate has most of it working) -- you'll never need to turn it off, rarely reboot, and it recovers almost instantaneously from sleep, so this to me is a non-issue.
Recording audio
It goes quickly downhill from at 1:36 in - James and Bohdan shows us how to record an audio file on the Windows XO. Remember, in Sugar this means pressing the "Record" activity on the bottom toolbar, selecting "Audio" (it defaults to photos, and the one "Record" activity records anything -- photos, video, or audio!), and pressing record -- done.
In XP, James navigates through 3 sub-menus of the Start Menu (Start-Programs-Accessories-Entertainment, for you following at home with your own XP, because when I think "record this" I think programs, then accessories, then entertainment!). So after finding the Sound Recorder, he then has to muck with the custom audio properties (Stereo sound and normal compression??) before recording finally. Right. That's intuitive.
We wanna sing & dance!
Recording video
At 2:20 he loads up Windows Movie Maker to capture video (again, to do this in Sugar, you'd just change from Audio to Video in the Record activity). Again he mucks with compression/quality settings (1/2 MB bitrate and 30 FPS -- really? I just want to press "record"). It works and has the standard Windows Movie Maker timeline/video editing capabilities.
"Sharing"
Microsoft expects teachers using Windows XOs to have USB thumbdrives (at 3:19) and be ready to pass them around their class to share videos/photos/recordings and such. Heck, I don't even let my thumbdrive leave my sight at work.
With class sizes of over 30, how long will it take for each student to plug a drive in, have it pop up, copy a video to their desktop (again, providing they have any space left over after Windows and Office), and then finding the "Safely Remove" icon in the taskbar, clicking it, and correctly selecting the thummdrive and not the Windows SD card, and then passing it to the next student.
Sharing a video becomes an all-class-session activity, when it should be done through improvements to the mesh and a peercasting video tool. To be fair, outside of shareable activities, the process currently doesn't work much better on the XO (at least without a School Server to host the shared file).
The swank OLPC XO-1 screen
Power
Putting the laptop into the tablet configuration in Windows seems to switch it to the no-backlight screen mode (4:00); which I hope is not automatic if a child wants to, I dunno, read a book at night in a house without any other light source? In no-backlight mode, he claims you can use the laptop for 20 hours, which I find hard to believe, but if Windows isn't supporting the mesh network and therefore the wifi is also turned off, it's remotely possible.
I watched full-screen video with wifi off on a flight recently and it lasted the full duration of the two and a half hour movie, plus another short TV episode, plus plenty of time left at the end to play the Implode activity (my secret XO addiction) before having to turn off all electronics for landing; so in full, CPU-sleeping screen-off mode, it probably could last that long. Maybe Sugar users should turn off wifi and see how long a backlightless Read activity can last?
Wifi
At 4:50 he shows us how to access a wireless network. Now, as a guy who often gets calls from parents, friends, parents of friends and friends of friends trying to connect to a wireless network in XP, I can safely say that configuring wifi on XP is one of the most confusing tasks ever to be standardized.
No mention of support mesh networking, which may mean that the laptops are not connected to even a local network once they leave the access-point connectivity of the school (if there's even good connection at the school; my experience with Jamaican schools built with lots of rebar, cinder blocks, and metal roofing all played havoc with omni-directional wifi ranges).
Security?
Not mentioned in the video of course is the dire need for security software -- anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-phishing and so on that's suddenly very important if you're releasing XP+IE machines to people who haven't developed a callous shell of cynicism and doubt when approached by Nigerian 419 scams, "Your computer is infected" flashing malware banner ads, and the like.
By the time you load all of this up, the low-power computer will slow to a barely-usable crawl. MS Defender may help against some of those; but we're back to adding cruft and cost when we look at anti-virus vendors.
Pinball teaches gravity - right?
Conclusions
Sugar had its faults; no doubt about it; but it was clean and intuitive with a core belief of an "unlimited ceiling" of upward development -- Sugar was an adult bike with many layers of training wheels that could be removed; with lots of integrated paths to help do just that with eToys teaching programming methods and the various puzzles teaching slowly-more-challenging problem solving skills.
Windows is designed against this, with no programming tools built in, and an almost anti-hacker/explorer/fiddler philosophy that goes beyond it merely being "closed source" to putting up impediments to learning any useful skills.
A draft of this entry was originally published at JonCamfield.com
Are you itching to ditch Sugar for an adult operating system? And does Ubuntu on the XO leave you wanting more?
Then you have another, proprietary option: Microsoft Windows XP on your XO laptop, making it a Windows XO computer. The first step to the Dark Side is easy, just update your XO firmware to OLPC Firmware Release q2e10.
This is the first test candidate for OFW2 series firmware that supports dual-boot of Linux and Windows XP. And we're not talking about the special red XO laptops either, this will allow XP to run on any XO.
But before you get too excited about upgrading to a Windows XO laptop, this XO firmware will not run a standard XP distro. Like the dual-boot video shows, you'll need a specially-prepared SD cards with an OLPC-specific version of Windows XP.
You'll also need to check your Open Source Software morals as you boot up.
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.
There's a lot of discussion about whether OLPC is an education project, or a laptop project. Many folks here think that recent developments show that the balance is tipped to the latter rather than the former.
It's neither. It's a sales project. If people don't buy them, it doesn't matter how pure our hearts are.
The folks that are buying them, Ministries of Education, governments, charities all have their own agendas. They do not necessarily line up with the agendas of our real customers - children and educators, or our own. If we have to give them some of what they want, so that we can get some of what we want to the children, it's a fact of life.
Selling constructionism is hard. The theory is attractive, but the data is not compelling. The buyers are probably not convinced going in that it's something they want or need. OLPC would probably have an easier time selling $100 Apple ][ clones with drill and practice software than the XO as it stands. If the buyers demand a machine that can run Windows, tell them that the XO can run Windows.
If you want skip the XP on the XO debate and really see what Microsoft has accomplished check out this video of Unlimited Potential's Bohdan Raciborski showing off Windows XO.Microsoft's James Utzschneider has this to say about the XP on XO effort and results:
So the long awaited moment has happened, Microsoft has bought One laptop Per Child with sweet promises to Nicholas Negroponte of more XO laptops sales. In what I feel is a massive marketing flaw, Negroponte has allowed the conversation around OLPC to be dominated by comparisons to business class computers. Just read his New York Times quote:
The future XO OS?
Education ministries want low-cost computers to help further education, but they often see familiarity with Windows-based computing as a marketable skill that can improve job prospects.
“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”
Now just who does Microsoft trot forward as an example of a possible XO laptop buyer? Save the Children, a large non-governmental organization that according to James Utzschneider, has a Windows-only policy. Let's read their quote from the XP on XO press release:
Allow us to start this entry by admitting that our heads are spinning just as much as yours. The events that unfolded over the past two weeks or so and all the responses, articles, comments, blog-posts and e-mails discussing them have been simply mind-boggling.
So some if not most of the things we're going to discuss here have probably been already mentioned elsewhere. However we do feel that an attempt to write a comprehensive text on why Windows on the XO isn't good for the educational mission at the heart of the project has to be made. And if only to help ourselves put things into perspective.
Translation and Localization
The first thing we want to discuss and a point that surprisingly hasn't received as much attention one would expect is translation and localization. It really shouldn't be necessary to explain while translated and localized software is important when it comes to an educational project.
In his argument for the need to have Windows XP on the XO laptop, Nicholas Negroponte puts forth a compelling reason for the change to a proprietary operating system from the current Open Source platform in his technology Review interview:
An XO marketing error
"When I went to Egypt for the first time, I met separately with the minister of communications, minister of education, minister of science and technology, and the prime minister, and each one of them, within the first three sentences, said, 'Can you run Windows?'" Negroponte says.
One future possibility is a "dual-boot" version of the OLPC machine, in which either Windows or Linux can be launched at start-up. If such a scheme were to materialize, Negroponte says, "I expect we will do a massive rollout in Egypt."
I believe that Negroponte's obsession with Microsoft Windows is a yet another strategic error - separate from any Open Source vs. proprietary discussion.
Your host is Benjamin Mako Hill who graciously allowed this re-publishing of his original post from Copyrighteous for OLPC News.
In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists.
Ben Mako Hill and XO laptop
Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time.
My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate.
Walter Bender's departure has marked a new evolution of the One laptop Per Child program. The battle for the very soul of OLPC is now out in the open with two distinct groups forming:
One laptop, two ideas
Walter Bender will be leading a one laptop per child global education movement focused on constructionism, as personified through Sugar, the Open Source user interface developed specifically for children.
Nicholas Negroponte will be leading a One Laptop Per Child laptop project focused on expanding XO sales worldwide, using whatever means necessary to achieve that.
We've all felt this dichotomy from the beginning, but only now are we really seeing the split, and its leaders emerge. I noticed the early signs when I read Walter Bender's last wiki posts on OLPC's success metrics:
This requires consensus on what is customer success. More laptop orders? Children learning?
If OLPC were a for-profit enterprise, one could argue that the customer is always right. Where does one draw the line? I thought the mission was learning, not selling laptops.
At the time, these comments suggested that Walter was growing disillusioned with a shift to a laptop sales priority. But with his resignation letter's focus on Open Source fresh in my memory, I read Brian Bergstein's report on the situation and I see a larger departure
As you may have already noticed, some days ago (so not an April fools' hoax) appeared a new job posting in the main laptop.org site: User Interface Developer for Sugar.
So, if you would like to become part of the core Sugar team and help to deliver a new platform for education, please apply!
What Tomeu Vizoso left out of his note is the change in the platform and software development strategy for OLPC. As a way to beat Microsoft at its own game, Sugar will soon be re-named:
Windows XO: A Child-Centric Operating Platform for Learning, Expression and Exploration
Better yet, OLPC is re-aligning its developers to be as child-centric as the name suggests. Windows XO will be developed using an innovative One Child Per Programmer (OCPP) process - each developer will be paired with a child from the developing world. These children will lead the software development process, from use case to bug tracking, and in high-profile Activities, approve every line of Python code.
Negroponte says that a Windows operating system is in the process of being fine-tuned on the XO as we speak. “Microsoft and OLPC are in discussion on how to release it, as well as how to announce,” he said. Negroponte added that the Windows operating system should be available on the XO in less than 60 days.
For me, that paragraph represents the end of a dream. I say that XP on the XO is the end of One Laptop Per Child as an educational project. With a Microsoft operating system, an XO becomes a "$200 laptop", a cheap Toshiba replacement, not an educational learning tool for children.
"[James] Utzschneider said Microsoft normally wouldn't have even talked about its XO effort this early, but was concerned by statements made by Nicholas Negroponte that suggested Windows was ready to go on the XO.
"We wanted to come out and say flat out that's not the case," Utzschneider said. "Despite all of the rhetoric, we don't think we can have a production version until the second half of 2008.""
But Microsoft is in fact working on putting XO on the XO, just not on a dual boot. Microsoft is designing its low-cost Windows and Office bundle to boot off a 2GB SD Card.
Tonight I shed a tear for Sugar. I am in sadness for it. I may even be in morning, here on the eve of my wedding.
I am reading Ivan Krstić blog about Microsoft and I see a repeat of history past in OLPC present. I see the death of Sugar, like so many other GUI dreams.
We will begin with a photo of Microsoft demoing Windows XP on the XO to OLPC. There I see happiness and awe. Geeks all excited about a new technology trick - fitting the fat Windows XP on the slim OLPC XO. Developers in awe of each other's work, a mutual respect of brilliance working together.
And when I read, I hear Ivan's optimism, his exuberance, his dedication to technology innovation:
The folks running this work on the Microsoft side are good people. They have left no doubt in my mind that they believe in what we’re doing and want to play along. I am also confident we have made the right decision at OLPC by embracing their work instead of stonewalling it.
But I must admit I do not share his belief than Microsoft sees One Laptop Per Child, the XO laptop with Sugar, as a configuration they want to play along with.
But the possibility of a dual boot is. And Nicholas Negroponte just told Dan Nystedt of IDG News Service that OLPC is working on a dual Windows/linux boot of the XO laptop:
"We are working with [Microsoft] very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful. We're working very hard to do both," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.
But is it possible? In the comments of another post, Winter, a frequent OLPC News contributor has this to say:
There is no room in the current XO for two OS's. It is that simple. To deliver dual boot laptops, they would need up to 8GB storage. But that would be a complete waste of storage space. Furthermore, for a lot of the technology, there is no Microsoft counterpart.
I am Monkey Boy and I wish to add more than my own complaint. I feel I need to add some commentary of my own at this time.
The way to beat Microsoft is to one up them always and consistently. Yes, Microsoft can reach out to media with their own spin and even stoop to graft and corruption of third world political figures to bend the truth as far as they think it will aid them. I do not accuse them of this ugliness; I just want to state that they have the ability to do such.
Putting XP on the OLPC right now will show the platform as being less capable than Sugar. It is the same thing that Linux does with Vista.
Show the computing results and let people decide. Sure, if Microsoft resorts to negativity and the lure of money, eventually it will be found out. How much negative press can one company withstand?
First, it would show that Windows is, well, an operating system.* For some people, it's even the one they prefer. But it's positively a good thing for people to realize that (on x86 machines, certainly) it's the indefinite article that applies.
I'm glad for the same reason to see Macs running Windows (via Bootcamp), or Rockbox replacing the stock firmware on Archos machines -- it helps disabuse people of the notion that for a given Machine X, only Operating System Q can be used. Better to let people compare different hardware on the same device, so they can see just what combination of features pleases them most.
In the world of educational software, one of those features is certainly going to be shareability and other aspects of software Freedom, and here, Linux+Sugar beats Windows XP all to pieces.
