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OLPC's "Give 1 Get 1" Comes To Europe
Christoph Derndorfer writes "Last year OLPC's XO-laptop was among the hottest Christmas gadgets thanks to the organization's G1G1 program, where you could donate $399 to give one XO-laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one yourself in return. However in 2007 the program was only available for US and Canadian citizens. This year's program, which takes off November 17, is also available to citizens in the EU member states, Switzerland, Russia, and Turkey. This is certainly awesome news for all the OLPC / Linux / gadget enthusiasts here in Europe! P.S. Before anyone asks, these XOs will come equipped with the child-friendly Sugar platform, which is based on Fedora 9, and not Windows XP."
I am based in the UK but ordered an XO in the initial G1G1 programme and had it delivered to a friend in the US who then sent it on to me here in London. All I can say is that the experience was an absolute debacle. If you check the forums of OLPC News you can see just how bad it was - repeated broken promises as to delivery dates, support staff who couldn't provide any answers and an end product less than what was initially promised (e.g. no separate power generating devices).
I was and still am a supporter of the OLPC; whilst the product itself is not aimed at me, even still I think it is a great computer and a lot of fun to use. I give them full credit as well for creating the "netbook" market from nothing. However, the G1G1 experience turned a lot of people off the OLPC organisation. It is hard to have confidence that they can execute their mission when they couldn't even get the logistics right for a first world country. I just hope we don't have a repeat of that this time around.
ah, for those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the website http://openpandora.org/
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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I one (actualy two) for the personal use of me and my family in the original G1G1 program. They arrived on time, are very robust little computers. Great battery life, super screen and with the latest software load, suspend to ram and other goodies work just great. We use them as our travelling computers. I loaded mplayer, opera and midnight commander on the little beast, built a cord so we could run it off the power plug in the car, and we are good to go. I bought a 120 gig usb powered HD for the little beasty, and ripped and loaded our dvd collection on the hard drive. Many hours of driving entertainment for the kids. The wifi is fabulous, and it never met a hotel setup it couldn't connect to instantly. For those hotels with hardwired ethernet, a $10 usb ethernet port does it all.
We are pleased.
Kurt