Updating my OLPC XO laptop

For a few months my XO laptop was my primary personal machine. I've written before about some of my favorite features, and after a year and a half with it, my favorites are still:

• A screen that is readable in full sunlight or glare
• Linux
• Long battery life
• Runs absolutely silently, no fans or spinning hard drive

However, there were a few drawbacks. It is a bit short on ram and processing power but most of the time I'm using simple programming tools, so I don't need much. Web browsing on some sites was a bit slow though. The biggest pain point in my book was the lack of copy and paste capability. I often found myself needing to retype a lengthy command in the terminal. On other systems I would have just copied and pasted from the web browser. For a while, I worked around this by using screen, which has a built in copy-paste buffer.

It turns out, in a recent release, the OLPC team has assuaged my number one annoyance. It is now possible to copy text from any of the activities (programs) and paste into another (like the terminal). In order to use this new goodness, I needed to update my XO operating system from the current version (656) to a newer build (802).

The process of updating turned out to be quite simple. If you are undertaking these same steps, please note, this does wipe out some parts of the operating system. New programs which you've installed using yum or rpm's might be erased depending on where they are installed. It looks like everything in the /home/olpc directory is untouched. For complete instructions, see the laptop.org wiki page for olpc-update.

To update, open the terminal and become root by executing

su

After that, make sure that your laptop is plugged in to a source of electricity and connected to the internet as this next step involved downloading the new operating system and overwriting your existing OS. Probably not something you want to lose power during.

To download and install the new OS run

/usr/sbin/olpc-update 802

Once you run this your laptop will spend the next several minutes to hours downloading and installing. A few exciting status messages will appear on your screen. Things like "Deleting old pristine version" - yikes!

I've found 802 to be a significant improvement over 656. The copy paste functionality is great and the UI looks and feels cleaner. Selecting applications and switching between them is easier than it used to be. With copy and paste now firmly in place I plan to use my little green machine quite a bit more.

XO Give One Get One - Round Two

As I was looking for some information on running the XO laptop in text mode, I stumbled across this page in the OLPC wiki:

One Laptop per Child is launching its second 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program starting in November, 2008, delivering its XO Laptop globally via Amazon.com. Although the first iteration of the 'G1G1' program was extremely successful and sold more than 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

The laptop's operating system will be Linux-based (it will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports).

If you've been thinking about getting one of these little green machines, it looks like the window will open once again. I wrote about the program last year. (Here is a list of all posts I've made on the XO Laptop.)

As for running in text mode, I've settled for using the terminal by pressing ctrl-fn-alt-1. To switch back to the normal view. press ctrl-fn-alt-3. For some reason, I can only start screen as root.

XO Laptop

My XO laptop arrived in the mail recently and it is quite an amazing little machine. Conclusion up front: I'm extremely satisfied with it and in some ways this laptop computer is better than ones that sell for ten times the price.

You might recall from a previous post that I had downloaded the XO's operating system and taken it for a test drive in an emulator. Now I have the real thing in front of me, and it's safe to say that it is even better. After all, some of the most innovative features of this computer are in the hardware. My favorite feature is the screen. It is viewable in direct sunlight which makes it usable outdoors. Second up would be the wireless networking. The graphical network selector is fun to use and the connection tends to be more reliable than any of the other computers I've used with my home wireless router. The battery life is also impressive, easily five hours on a charge of its small battery. It even has a built-in camera and microphone.

It runs all of the software I need too. I used the instructions I wrote up when I installed firefox on the emulated operating system. Everything went smoothly and I was browsing the web using firefox in a few minutes (The XO laptop comes with a perfectly good web browser, but I wanted to use my favorite plugins and have more control over downloads).

I'm quite taken with the little machine. I've been using it as my primary computer at home, using it for all of the tasks I normally do (mostly browsing the web and programming). There are a couple of things that I would change if I had the chance. The first is the keyboard. It is an interesting design, made of a flexible rubber-like substance, and it works much better than other flexible keyboard that I've tried, but it took a while to get used to the shift key (I have to press in the corner of the key). The other difficulty is presented by the slower processor, but it doesn't get in my way most of the time. The only time I notice any slowness is when playing flash videos (like on YouTube). Perhaps part of the problem is flash for Linux, but I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really mind as I don't watch that much video, and if I want to, I have other computers that I can use.

It will probably come as no surprise that I wrote this post using the little green computer. I'm saddened by the end of the "give one get one" program, as I think there is still the opportunity for more people to donate and receive their own XO. If anyone is interested, it might be possible to order a batch of one hundred or more through the "give many" program.

One Laptop Per Child, Give One Get One

If you are looking for a cheap, power efficient, portable laptop for wireless web browsing and programming, like I was, consider the XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child association. I ordered one to keep and one as a donation through the Give One Get One program. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, I'm especially interested in the wireless mesh networking and social aspects to using the laptop. Some of the the music software looks like fun as well.

I'm ordering one for mostly selfish reasons, but this is probably my first computer purchase which will benefit someone else. Who knows, perhaps a child in a developing nation will discover a new world of seemingly limitless possibilities through programming just like I did as a child. This is my personal take on the vision behind this unique program. The opportunity to order one is slipping away fast, the offer to buy one and give one away ends December 31st. Let me know if you've ordered one, perhaps we can organize a laptop party (Arne I'm looking at you ;-)