sprocket i/o

OLPC XO-1 B2-1 Prototype

When I sat down at my temporary visitors desk in The Dalles, I was excited to see that it already had a laptop ready to go for me: An OLPC XO prototype unit. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is a non-profit organization, founded by members of MIT’s Media Lab, who trying to make a $100 laptop for children around the world. The XO-1 laptop is designed to be kid-proof in both hardware and software, easy to maintain, very low power usage, and designed around the concept of a wireless mesh network. The laptop itself is not generally for sale to private individuals, but instead is marketed toward governments, particularly their education departments. The OLPC folks however are going to be selling a limited number of XO-1 units to people in the US on November 12th as part of their Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) campaign.

The first thing you notice when you look at the XO-1 is the two large antennas sticking out of the monitor. The only networking option out-of-the-box for the XO-1 is in fact wireless. By default, the XO-1 tries to connect to any wireless (managed mode) network available. It then has the capability of sharing this network with anyone else who has an XO-1. One of the unique aspects of the XO-1 is that it tries to setup a mesh network for other laptops to use. This is, each laptop acts as a repeater to increase the distance of the wireless network, so that other further-away laptops can get better access. This chain of connectivity is a central principal of the XO-1, and very useful to areas in developing countries with sparse wireless access. Unique to the XO-1, is that it’s wireless chipset will still act as an active mesh point even if the laptop is powered off.

The laptop is running Fedora Linux 7 (Red Hat), though with a custom user-interface named Sugar, designed for children to use in a collaborative environment. The icons are large and simple, and there is very little text, as you cannot depend on reading comprehension within the target age group (6-16). There are many simplified applications, named ‘activities’, that have been modified so that you can easily share information with other people on your mesh network, without a central server. One interesting aspect for developers like myself is that the Sugar interface is written in Python using PyGtk, making it very easy to customize. The Pepper Pad environment is also available for the OLPC, and of course, you can run any X11 window manager you want. XFCE in particular should run great on this machine.

The prototype unit that I have (B2-1-Ext) is a bit slow, coming in at only 366MHz instead of the 533MHz model on the production line right now. The keyboard, a rubbery water-resistant membrane type, takes a bit of getting used to if you have adult-sized fingers. The screen is surprisingly good quality, and uses some ingenious techniques to get a crisp display with it’s lower pixel count. The screen has a low-power visible light mode designed for outdoor use, which appeared to work quite well. The OLPC comes with only 1GB of solid-state storage, but it does have an SD card which makes it trivial to add another 8GB for storage if necessary. The networking works well, though as I mentioned, WPA is unsupported, so I could only connect the XO-1 to my MacBook Pro for testing.

After using the Autoreinstallation image to trivially upgrade to the latest ‘stable’ release without network access, the OLPC was updated to build 542. The build that will be used in the production versions is 623, so a lot has actually changed since the version I played with. The machines come pre-loaded with tons of educational goodies: a library of e-books, painting software, a word processor (based on AbiWord), a web browser, feed reader, some music-making software, and a handful of small games. One surprise is that the OLPC uses the Gecko web browser engine (like Firefox), instead of the more svelte WebKit (like Safari), though this is being worked on. OLPC users who want a faster browser should download Opera for the OLPC.

Overall, the laptop seems to be very well geared for it’s target audience, but with the limitations in performance (533MHz, 256MB) and application access, there are better all-around portable computing solutions. Regular users who don’t require mesh-networking and do not require a kid-proof machine should look at the $400 Asus EEE instead for general use. As this laptop is designed around open-source computing, I can definitely see it being popular with Linux hackers. I’m quite tempted to pick one up myself through the G1G1 program.

For more information, seeOLPC News. I’ve posted a few photos of my prototype unit as well.