My OLPC XO-1 G1G1 Arrived!

December 19th, 2007 · Comments

Last month, I set my alarm to go off at 3am PST to participate in the first few minutes of the One Laptop Per Child: Give One, Get One program. Today, Christmas came early when they delivered the OLPC XO-1 to my house. Like any geek would, I took photos of it’s unboxing. So far, so good.

According to /etc/issue, my OLPC comes with build 650, which is a few builds newer than the one I previewed last month. Build 650 is only two weeks old, yet build 653 has already been released, with upgrade instructions available at the Activated Upgrade page. Build 653 has some reliability fixes, including the ‘spanish laptops booting in english’ bug, and enhanced WPA support. I may in fact upgrade later in the week as I get more familiar with things.

The OLPC has been trivial to get up and running and use. As the worlds first laptop that only supports Linux, it seems that they have done everything possible to make it easy for the end-user. Configuring my wireless was as simple as clicking on a circle with the name of my wireless network. Browsing, while full-featured, is somewhat slow. I may in fact install Opera for the OLPC for faster browsing support.

While I wouldn’t call the OLPC XO-1 fast, I would say it’s quite sufficient for browsing the web, hacking at a terminal, and other general use applications. With a 433MHz processor and 256MB of RAM, it’s not going to be a photo-editing powerhouse anytime soon. I do look forward to taking this little booger around with me, however.

Here are some links I found useful for additional OLPC information: