In case you haven’t figure it out, the blue object is the USB ethernet adapter

A naughty attempt to install Powermanga on the XO. Half way there!

Safiyyah, 7 and new owner of the XO,  pWn1ng the box for fun and profit

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.

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.

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.

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.

Comparing OLPC XO vs Dell Latitude X1

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