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OLPC Operating System Available to Download
ThePopeLayton writes "Engadget is reporting that the operating system made specifically for the OLPC project is now available for download. 'Apparently, the Linux-based Sugar OS from the One Laptop Per Child project is now available via a bootable LiveCD ISO, and according to user reports, works quite well aside from the lack of WiFi capability on a certain MacBook.'"
I actually want to try this. I'm interested in the OLPC project and I hope they release a laptop in the US for sale, because I'd buy one in an instant. It's cheap, lightweight, and I don't demand much from a computer, so the low performance isn't an issue with me.
Is there a supported hardware list? On what hardware does WiFi work?
Another OLPC distro is also available from the makers of the pepperpad. You can find it at pepper.com. They claim it may even be quicker then the perl based interface on the official OLPC desktop.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
And the UI programmers never really put together a comprehensive list of activities. No matter how much beta testing, they always leave something out.
That's not as much of a problem with the OLPC. One of the activities is the Develop activity, which lets you make new activities that do whatever you want.
There's not much difference between "activities" and traditional "applications" here: Sugar activities get full control of the screen and they are the "thing" that gets shared between users in the multi-user environment. Otherwise, it's just a word choice to get the developers to concentrate more on what the user is doing than what they are doing it with.
In the case of pipelines, an activity is established as a flow of data between things - applications, devices, who cares? You can set up whatever pipelines you like and then your activity is triggered by dropping the initial data into the initial pipeline. Very simple. Anyone familiar with Jackson Structured Diagrams or a flowchart could put together as many activities as they liked without working up a sweat. It becomes nothing more than shell scripting with a GUI shell, and what one of us couldn't write whatever app they wanted in a shell script? Many probably have.
In the OO concept, you create activities by linking the applications as objects. Basically the same idea as pipelines and it's still shell scripting, the difference is that pipelines are isomorphic and isolated, whereas objects are polymorphic and inherited.
It would take most coders maybe a day to write a full-blown "shell" environment using one of these two approaches that would preserve the activity metaphor but give you absolute, total freedom.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)