2008
11.24

OLPC XO – Part 1

Category: Linux, OLPC, hardware / Tag: , , ,  / Add Comment


The OLPC XO

I ‘won’  the OLPC XO at the recent Foss.MY 2008  just in time for my eldest son 8th birthday. The only problem was that it came without an adapter. So I finally had the time yesterday to get one of those made in China ‘Universal’ power adapter for notebooks, thanks to the OLPC wiki and some pictures at flickr.

The made in China Laptop Adapter!

Initially my son thought that the Xo was one of those kiddie laptops so he wasn’t that excited. Anyhoo, after booting it up and connecting the Xo to our wireless lan, he was convinced that this is a Linux box with a strange cute interface.

ping 202.188.1.5 :-)

And thus we spent a couple of hours, going through some of the applications and figuring out how the desktop environment, Sugar, works. From the initial experience, it seems that I got to spend some time reading the official wiki. I can see already some good applications for learning programming  like Scratch and Pippy. Also there’s a browser for playing flash games reading wikipedia and sending emails. Sound and all the other thingies worked as expected.

Jihad hacking the Xo

Size-wise, the XO is suitable for kids. It is also quite durable or ‘dropable’. I got Jihad to do all the typing as the keyboard was a tad too small for my hands.The hardware specs might be a bit at the low end for doing multiple things at the same time, but sufficient for the educational activities intended for kids 8-12 years old.

OLPC XO vs Dell Latitude X1

Comparing OLPC XO vs Dell Latitude X1

I’ll post some more stuff on our adventure on the XO in the future. w00t.

 

 

9 comments so far

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  1. mythrage said: 2008.11.26 00:21

    Skang ni sy tengah dok buat translation untuk software dalam XO tu… kalo nak join untuk translation tu, bleh la bukak alamat nih…

    https://dev.laptop.org/translate/

  2. Yac00b said: 2008.11.28 22:25

    Congrats on winning the XO. Looks like Adli Jr. is already geared up to take the security field by storm… I cant wait to see him win HITB.

  3. akram said: 2008.12.03 10:08

    cool! targeting this laptop when my son know what is laptop for. Now he only know laptop for biting purpose only. :P

  4. ayoi said: 2008.12.03 16:20

    Ahah.. Another 1337 in the making :D . Anyway I think our kids need early exposure in this IT stuff.. Just look at our counterpart from other countries like US.. I used to chat with a kid (16 years old) teaching me about C lol and this many many years back lor.

    I guess I should start teach my kids that MAC is THE computer, others are imitation lol

  5. mnajem said: 2008.12.15 17:29

    I think M’sian weren’t that bad as well, and if you look aroud US faculty members most of them are not even Caucasian American, instead people who migrated from say; India, China and some Arabs.

  6. salaz said: 2008.12.15 21:34

    cool laptop there..wish i had one when i was kid ;-p

  7. 19zim said: 2009.01.06 00:37

    salaz, buy one from http://www.amazon.com/xo for $399 only or join us to contribute in OLPC.

    http://olpcmalaysia.blogspot.com/

  8. salaz said: 2009.03.04 11:16

    l9zim: thanx for the url, just asking,btw i’ve juz bought 1 of the ibm models recently.
    adli: i noticed on the latitude, the sticker, is it on the Qatar airlines? used to have those stickers before..haha

  9. adli said: 2009.05.02 01:21

    Salaz: yup got it from Qatar Airlines ;-)

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