OLPC Prototype To Play With

The Accessibility Program Office team has been in two days of meetings. For somebody whose personal philosophy is that the usefulness of a meeting is indirectly proportional to the length of time it takes and the number of people involved, this has been a bit of a struggle.

What helped ease the pain was that we were in the Drawing Room at the Executive Mansion on the Santa Clara campus. This has got to be one of the nicest Sun buildings I've had the pleasure to work in.

We have come away with a list of tasks that we will need to focus on, and a prioritized list.

One of the other good things that happened was that Peter Korn kindly lent me an OLPC prototype that he was given at CSUN last year. The one I had trouble opening. While we are waiting for the Give One Get One! folks to get their act together, Duncan and I can have a play with this. It looks like the battery is completely dead (and I haven't worked out yet how to recharge it -- assuming you can), so we'll have to keep it plugged in for now.

What I also need to work out (apart from learning yet another completely new desktop UI) are two things:

• This machine is about a year old, and only has 128Mb. Should I try to upgrade it to the latest build? Will that be able to run in half the amount of memory that "modern" XO laptops now have?

• What is the best way to upgrade this? The wiki page talks about going into the virtual terminal: Hold down Alt, Ctrl, and the 'Neighborhood' key -- third key from the left along the top row -- and run olpc-update. Now I admit, this machine, its operating system and desktop environment are all new to me, but as far as I can see, this just doesn't work for me, and I suspect it's a feature that's been added in, in the last year. How do you get to a virtual terminal on a machine that's about a year old, and can I expect to find olpc-update when I get there?

  It looks like another way to upgrade this might be to do an Activated Upgrade. I need to read all a lot more before I feel comfortable making a choice.

Any advice on this would be very much appreciated. Until I've determined whether I should do an upgrade, and the best approach, I'm going to keep reading the wiki and we are going to try out the built-in applications using the current build (even though it's positively ancient on the XO laptop timescale).

[Technorati Tag: OLPC]

( Feb 01 2008, 03:41:54 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [13]