I’ve spoken about the OLPC laptop before, Twice, in fact. Mine has finally arrived after much wasted time on Fedex’s part. I still prefer UPS. Fedex was supposed to deliver the OLPC on Dec 20th, I didn’t receive it until the 26th. Whoops!
Within the box you find the laptop, a power adapter, the battery, a quickstart guide and a letter from Nicholas Negroponte.
The first thing I noticed was just how small it is. For whatever reason I was expecting it to be about 50% larger. The keyboard is very small and I cannot touch type, I can only hunt and peck with my index fingers. All attempts to type normally end in me making way too many typos. It’s designed for small hands, not mine.
The hardware itself is very solid. Everything is well thought out and it feels very solid in my hands. It’s not a heavy device but it has some heft to it. Holding it by the handle is very easy, it won’t weigh you down. The screen is very interesting. The overall resolution is very high and when using it indoors it is very easy to read and use. Interestingly enough, the first thing most people mention is the color scheme and if I chose it. Everyone seems to really take to the green.
The software side of the device is not as good. The included software does work, albeit on the slow side, but it’s very limiting. The sugar interface is well designed and once you get used to it it’s very simple to navigate. There are a lot of things missing though. For instance the touchpad on the device extends almost the entire width of the laptop but only the center works in practice. The outer edges have not been setup inside the operating system. The web browser, a derivative of Firefox it seems, doesn’t in any way support multiple tabs. If you want to look at two pages at once you have to load two separate instances of the browser, no small task on this low power laptop. Once you do have the two browsers open it takes about 15 seconds switch between them as the underpowered laptop takes some time to redraw the windows. This, with the addition of not being able to copy and paste makes working with the pre-loaded software cumbersome to say the least. I don’t expect this would present it self as an issue to a person who has never used a computer before; if you have nothing to compare it two it would be fine.
To make the device more useful to me, separate and apart from use by children, was to install the XFCE desktop environment to replace Sugar. This was simple enough to do using this blog post at FreelikeGnu.org. As I mentioned before you cannot copy and paste so type carefully.
Once inside XFCE, I was able to install the regular version of the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client from the built in software repositories without any trouble. Add in a bit of software hacking to get the wireless working, a battery gauge and all is well. I have a small little laptop to.. play around with. For me it makes a nice machine to use when I’m SSH’ing into one of my servers ect. or doing some light web surfing but I have little actual use for the machine, and bought it to support the OLPC project more then anything. On the plus side Flash video does work, though only at about 1 frame per second. Sound plays back just fine and Pandora works great as well. Headphones make the experience worth while.
Overall, I do like the machine and am anxiously awaiting software updates. I know that many many improvements are on the way that will change how the software works and clean the whole interface up. The developers know how slow and in some cases unstable the software that it came with is and are working to fix all the issues. Rumor I heard was that the hardware guys finished their work and the machine was released before the software guys were able to catch up. Doesn’t seem too far fetched and, as anyone who has every bought anything computer related can attest to, is not an uncommon problem.
The OLPC machines are no longer available through the Give 1 Get 1 program but I heard that they will be available in other countries soon and perhaps again in the US around the holidays. We’ll see. If they release a new machine I’ll be first in line to get it. If nothing else it’s been a great project for me and I’m still very much behind OLPC. After all, it’s never been about the laptop it self but what the laptop enables people to do.
Topslakr