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New OLPC Laptop 1.5 Dual-Boots Sugar, Gnome Desktop
griffjon writes "The new hardware release (you can read about the upgrade here) also comes with a dual-boot option. Start rejoicing now; it's not XP or Sugar (the native, education-centric OS) — it's Sugar or Gnome. And of course there are other homebrew distributions like Xtra Ordinary, built off of Debian."
The boot time on both seem a little slow however. Would be nice if they also build really minimalistic OS that supports just browsing - kind of like Chrome OS. Maybe it gets integrated in the future versions? Would make a good sense with OLPC.
I'm really not complaining too much about Gnome; my wife finds it easy enough to navigate. However, it's still got its problems, and Sugar turned out to be a mess.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
From TFA, it sounds like you just have a choice between desktop environments. . . like you can do in every other Linux distro . . . Not that dual-booting two separate OSes makes much sense (as a default shipping option, anyway).
The hardware is fixed. I don't see why boot can't be just load/uncompress an active image.
All the innovation is slowly being peeled back. Look at the OLPC now and you see a stripped back, diluted netbook. The VIA C7-M architecture is about 4-5 years old. To say the core of this hardware is pushing the boundaries is laughable. Once upon a time the OLPC team would take a leap and risk their necks on an interesting HW choice - now they're tied to X86 so they can suckle off MS. I sincerely hope that V2 brings the design back to its low power roots by embracing ARM although the way Negroponte is shacking up with the Windows brigade does not look hopeful. Kids don't need 720p playback (The screen for one isn't suitable). Looking at the OLPC now just makes me sad, and a little angry that this revision is going to be lauded so much. My Dell Mini 10 is more innovative...
Windows 7 has been re-engineered for netbooks, I got it to run on my 486 DX II no problem. I guess the education community decided to discriminate Microsoft after they give out so much in cheap software (i.e. $19 for EIGHT windows 7 serial keys via MSDNAA)
I believe the Negroponte's goal is to get computers into the hands of students in developing countries. Not to promote open source software. Now, I know from experience that open source software is significantly less expensive on a per seat basis, builds local skills and support, and offers flexibility you just can't get from other options. The problem is the customer doesn't. I've seen too many school board members and district technology heads married to Microsoft and Apple and whoever else with a marketing budget that walks through the door. All Negroponte is doing is adjusting to his customers to get the hardware through the door. Now I'd prefer he use his bully pulpit to drive the cost savings and flexibility open source provides, but they've chosen not to. The technology is easy, the politics are hard.
The OLPC needs to cost half as much, run twice as fast, with twice the memory. Then it will meet the expectations they made for it two years ago. I know. I own one.
I'd run an OS called SugarGnome any day just so I could brag at parties.
Xtra Ordinary is not free. The author wants to make money from it. You can buy a flash card of the release or mail him a flash card for a reduced price. I have asked the author to provide a downloadable image but the request was refused. This can only mean one thing.
Kriston
You obviously missed the part about "being able to tinker with everything".
The windows 7 source code is not available to be tinkered with.
So windows 7 and really any proprietary software does not meet the basic mission requirements.
You can tinker with software without having access to the source. Game modders are a fine example...
Highly customizable software like Apache is software that most people won't ever compile themselves.
It is not about being able to customize (like game mods), it is about being able to learn. If you don't have source code, you have no real way of learning how software works.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
This subject-line joke is solely topical and will lose its meaning in a week or less.
Sure you do. You just can't learn how real programmers made it.
But even before I learned how to code stuff, I could spot game bugs and guess what the reason was for their existence.
Same for UI glitches. And for older games, AI glitches.
Way to miss the point.
Anyway, windows 7 = "almost" as fast as XP, XP = not fast enough for netbooks and definitely not the OLPC. Also have to consider the real cost of windows is, MS ULTRA CHEAP OMG WINDOWZ LIZENZES are actually meant to be paid for real later...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Mein gott... No, even the most advanced modding = basically just working around tons of black boxes. OLPC's vision = constructivism through completely transparent code. You can't even compare them. Sorry. For education, modding would be just a joke in comparison to what the OLPC is looking for.
Though maybe modding is a better way to "train" kids rather than making them learn. Modding will train them for a world in which real programming, real freedom and real rule-setting is made by some faceless council of more 'special people', and you just get the black box version in which you have to comply with everything they say while trying to work around everything. At the end of the day you truly have no idea how things work, you just know that if you do X , Y happens. You are given the impression you can express yourself, but you actually can't do it beyond the closed canvas imposed by the random council... You are free to do as much as you stay inside the box. Great training.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I'm thinking back to when I played Kotor. The virtual memory usage would rise into the gigabytes, and then it'd crash.
I determined it was a memory leak caused from loading saved games. I theorized that it wasn't freeing resources properly on load. How did I do it? By watching VRAM usage in the task manager.
I posted it on the forums, and never got a response - but at least I notified them of a bug, and pinpointed it pretty accurately. You could say that having access to the source would be a boon here, but the truth is a novice non-coder isn't going to be able to fix it even with the source, and FOSS and proprietary software are just as bad at not fixing user reported bugs.
That leads me to conclude that if I had had access to the source code, it wouldn't have made any difference - except perhaps I would have wasted time looking into it. Source code is great for learning programming, but there's a lot of basics you have to understand first, before you can make sense of stuff like that.
I respect the goals of the OLPC project, but I'm not convinced fully 100% open source is necessary for children to learn computers.
Why does this article have a Debian graphic? Sugar OS is based off Fedora and Xtra Ordinary is a totally separate project.
Way to miss the point.
Please clarify the point, then.
Anyway, windows 7 = "almost" as fast as XP
In UI responsiveness, perhaps - assuming adequate specs to run both operating systems. I have a feeling Win7 will be horribly slow if you actually got it to run on a P3 with 256MB of RAM.
XP = not fast enough for netbooks and definitely not the OLPC
OLPC 1.5 has a 1.0ghz C7-M, I thought? That's quite a bit beefier than the laptops XP originally shipped on. And if I read the specs correctly, 1GB of RAM too?
XP is faster than Ubuntu, and people try to run that on their netbooks. Seems to me both are decently suited to the task. You could also strip XP down with a tool like nLite. I did that for a relative that had an old Thinkpad 390e, which turned it into a speed demon. Booted in about 30-35 seconds, started Firefox 2 in about 12, and OpenOffice 2.x in ~15. Warm starts were only a second or two. Hibernation only took ~20 seconds from power-on to desktop.
To compare, I have Ubuntu installed on a 1.2ghz Via Eden computer, and it's nowhere near that fast. Booting takes a long time, and OpenOffice takes forever to start up. Firefox is faster, at just 8 seconds, but Firefox is also newer, so that's not a fully valid comparison. Memory usage at boot is 3x higher, at just over 130MB.
However, I'm not a linux guru, and I haven't finished tweaking Ubuntu yet. To give it a fair shake, I need to be able to claim equal expertise at Ubuntu modding as I have with XP modding.
Also have to consider the real cost of windows is, MS ULTRA CHEAP OMG WINDOWZ LIZENZES are actually meant to be paid for real later...
Windows isn't suitable for the OLPC. Microsoft has very corporate motivations rather than charitable ones. The main reason it isn't suitable isn't cost, but rather how quickly they drop support.
Microsoft is unwilling to customize XP for such a device, because they'd have to support it - and yet they want XP on it, because it's great marketing.
As far as I'm concerned the OLPC project should stay the hell away from Microsoft - but XP still makes a fine choice for netbooks, especially for someone willing to dig in and mod it a bit. :)
Sure you do. You just can't learn how real programmers made it.
But even before I learned how to code stuff, I could spot game bugs and guess what the reason was for their existence.
Same for UI glitches. And for older games, AI glitches.
Are you demonstrating that you are incapable of learning?
Bikehelmet I call you out as an MS shill no way is XP faster than a linux distro. I work on a daily basis with multiple OS and MS products are the slowest of the bunch.
It's a shame the work of the OLPC kernel developers / volunteers who made the Xtra Ordinary distro possible don't get any credit. The "debxo" distribution http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DebXO has been going for a long time and has done all the hard work (i.e., XO-1-specific work) of getting debian to work on the XO-1.
I determined it was a memory leak caused from loading saved games. I theorized that it wasn't freeing resources properly on load. How did I do it? By watching VRAM usage in the task manager.
I posted it on the forums, and never got a response - but at least I notified them of a bug, and pinpointed it pretty accurately. You could say that having access to the source would be a boon here, but the truth is a novice non-coder isn't going to be able to fix it even with the source, and FOSS and proprietary software are just as bad at not fixing user reported bugs.
Had Kotor been open source, you wouldn't have been at the mercy of the developers for fixing a bug. Instead, anyone could have ran with it, and actually published what the problem was and what he did to fix it. I reckon that even for you, as a non-coder, that would have been a far more interesting experience than the one you just described. Heck, you might even have opened up the source file for just a peek. malloc(), free(), sizeof() etc really aren't all that complicated once you grasp the concept of what they actually do in the background.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I believe the Negroponte's goal is to get computers into the hands of students in developing countries. Not to promote open source software. Now, I know from experience that open source software is significantly less expensive on a per seat basis... All Negroponte is doing is adjusting to his customers to get the hardware through the door. Now I'd prefer he use his bully pulpit to drive the cost savings and flexibility open source provides, but they've chosen not to. The technology is easy, the politics are hard.
The customer was the third world education minister - and he didn't like the product. Summary of Laptop Orders
The demand for Windows and Office came from the bottom up.
A US-based non profit organization called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is planning to distribute three million XO laptops, each costing Rupees 11000, among children entering schools by the end of 2009.
It has already distributed 1000 laptops in 20 schools in UP, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on an experimental basis.
Its ultimate mission is to ensure that all school children, aged between five and 12, are able to effectively engage with their own personal laptop.
Each XO PC comes with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office pre-loaded, besides many other features.
Satish Jha, President and C.E.O, OLPC India, said the project is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Bright star Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, Microsoft, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat.
Each company has donated two million dollars. Microsoft is contributing through its features that are fitted into the XOs
The OLPC has set up its India office in New Delhi.
US-based outfit to distribute three million laptops to poor Indian rural kids [Reuters July 10]
The largest single deployment of the the XO ever.
Ten times that of anything which came before - it triples the XO's installed base - and it is the first significant deployment of the XO in Asia.
These are hugely significant landmarks.
But not a word, not a breath, of the story seems to have penetrated Slashdot.
Not everyone needs to be a hacker to improve the OLPC. Only a few bright tinkerers are really needed to provide the really complex work and everyone will benefit. Such work would not be feasible without the software being FOSS
The XO-1.5 is not an upgrade; it's a new model. For all you XO-1.0 owners, you can go back to sleep now.
And the link is to an article dated September 8th. I'm sure most OLPC-watchers have seen it already. (I know I did. And said "ho hum, it won't apply to my XO-1".)