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.

I’m sure by now most attendees have blogged about their experiences at foss.my, people they met, old friends that haven’t changed much and the lame old jokes about windows bsod and how penguins weren’t hurt behind the scenes while preparing the slides [1]

Overall I find the conference impressive awesome! Kudos to the organizers who did the whole thing in like 3 days or something hehe. Here are my thoughts about the event in point-form.

• The most educational and enlightening talk has got to be the Open Source and  OCRA Screen Reader by Kaeru. The best part was the live demo on how difficult it is for visually-challenged people rely on the screen reader to do their work on the computer. Kudos to the gentleman from the Malaysia Association of the Blind and Kaeru. Totally ‘menginsafkan’!
• I love the lightning talk slots. They were simple, short, lively and the speakers don’t have much time to digress haha. Fadil (the Debian-using DJ?) who MCed the slots  made it even more livelier. I also did a quick one on plotting stuff on googlemap for security visulization.
• I didn’t quite get the last keynote by Jayakumar. Hmm.
• The event gathered a lot of people from various communities and organizations. I was able to attach (nick)names, blogs, to faces. Coolness!
• Some of the talks didn’t like start on time for whatever reasons. However what was more annoying is when you hear the MC saying things like ‘oh this is Malaysia bla bla bla’ (not once ok!). This is your event, hello!

 Anywyas, I felt the the two-days was well worth it. I’d come again next year. I would also like to thank the crazy crowd (Amran, Shakir and some other folks) for helping me to win an OLPC for my son. More on our adventure with the OLPC later.

End Notes

[1] Making fun about other OSes or Distros is soo 90′s! In reality, at work people work with a couple of OSes/Distros – BSDs, Linux, Windows, Symbian etc, to get the job done!

I just registered and paid to attend foss.my this weekend ! I hope to see and catch up with people and maybe learn a new thing or two. Any other 3bosser going (or alive?