My thoughts on the OLPC project.

Yes, I’m late, but I really do think sometimes (the

horror!) and I couldn’t find a better topic for my post today.

There’s a project called One Laptop Per Child. It aims to bring 3rd world countries laptops for their kids. One per kid. Absolutely free. It’s nice but a bit…well, just read on.

Sometimes called the $100 laptop, the name of OLPC’s unit is “XO.” (Apparently, we’re hugging and kissing the children of the third world.) It has a stripped-down version of Fedora Core as it OS, carrying the moniker “Sugar,” taking less than 150MB of space. It has a modest processor (less than 500MHZ clock speed) and only 1GB memory (including the OS). It has 256MB RAM. It has several USB ports and antennas which have 3x the range of normal Wi-Fi receptors.

It’s a very durable machine. With no spinning hard drive and only 2 internal cables, there’s little chance of failure for anything. It has a remarkable 12-hr battery and two display modes: full color and B&W (which is easier to read in bright sun). Because it consumes so little electricity, human power is enough to charge it. It’s likely to come with two of the following: a pull-cable, a pedal, and a hand crank.

Software includes a web browser (Firefox), chat client, word processor, and an e-book reader, among other things.

Seems great, huh? Now I’ll tell you the bad stuff.

1. Find me a Wi-Fi connection in the middle of the Sahara..or rural India. Deep Mexico? No? Oh…that sucks.
   - OLPC attempts to solve this through the “Mesh Network” which networks all XOs within range of each other. They in turn network a connection to others, and so on and so forth. They’re all wireless routers and WiFi receptors with 3x the normal range. Cool, but what happens when the original laptop, connected to the hotspot (the root if you will) is turned off? What then?
2. Not to be racist, but we’ve seen what happens when *some* third world people have access to the internet. (Mr. Nabantuu, I’m still waiting for my wire transfer from the accounts of the late Sir Michael “Forthwort”!)
3. One gig of memory, 256 MB of RAM, and they expect this to be a general use computer? Just gut a $50 five gigabyte flash key. Yeah, they’re that cheap at the Walgreens down the street. (That’s a drugstore, so probably even cheaper at a computer store and definitely in bulk.)
4. This is a big one: the web browser (as I said, a stripped-down Firefox, stripped-down being key) doesn’t have a URL bar. The home page is Google and you are apparently expected to search for websites. (Does it have bookmarks?) The only way this makes any sense is if (like Mozilla) they have a partnership with Google wherein they make money from searches done with there product. This could fund the project. Do they have such a partnership?
5. They expect it to sell retail in countries like the U.S.A., the U.K., Canada, and the more profitable European and Asian countries. At about $150 ($100 means the production cost)…riiiiiiiiight. There’s, for the same price, the obviously superior Medison Celebrity (also Linux-based). It’s a nice dream, but just fund the project with an aforementioned Google partner; smart parents will buy their kids a Celebrity or a Macbook.

So, the project, which is a great idea, has it ups and downs. But it’s the Yin and the Yang which make life balance itself out. I sincerely hope that they overcome the stated problems and turn this into a breakthrough in communication from the rice paddies of China to the cities of Chile. (Julio and Yong-Ping are friends, you know.)

Yours in loving Linux,

Sam