Hacking the XO Laptop 95
dulceLeche writes "While the OLPC was not designed with the American consumer in mind, people that took part in the Give One Get One program have been having fun with their XOs. The XO has a number of limitations, but with some work you can get Opera running, chat over your mesh network, and much more. An article at Geek.com explains what a few folks were able to do with their XOs."
Go on (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Go on (Score:1, Informative)
The hardware, not so much.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Subtle Jokes are Always the Best (Score:3, Informative)
[joke spoiler] The laptop is silent in normal operation. They only chirp if you launch a specific classroom activity designed to use acoustic signals to measure the distance between two laptops. It's quite neat actually. I guess if you have a classroom of students who all launch this particular application at once, it'll be pretty noisy.
Xubuntu on the XO (Score:4, Informative)
I have Xubuntu on it in a dual boot system, with ubuntu on an SD card. Followed moocapiean's directions [olpcnews.com]. Works great. No glitches.
So, as for it being hackable, I'd say that it's easy to *change*, in ways it wasn't originally intended to run. You don't have to break anything to do that, so maybe it's not strictly speaking hackable. But then, nothing open source is hackable.
Depends on your definition hackable.
Re:"not designed with the American consumer in min (Score:4, Informative)
-kurt-
How easy was it to make Opera work? (Score:1, Informative)
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components [laptop.org]
When we look at what the guys in tfa went through, we get the idea that they didn't know something the OLPC people knew.
Then they go through a screen full of stuff on the command line.
And finally they get it working.
Re:"designed to be hackable"? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the only laptop I've ever heard of that uses Open Firmware, or any open source BIOS. There are even tutorials [laptop.org] on hacking it in the wiki. Plus, most of the GUI and applications are written in Python and are designed to be relatively easy to modify.
The hardware itself is far from hackable though. There is very little, if anything, that can be modified inside the thing, even though it is easy to disassemble. I imagine its the result of making it as cheap and rugged as possible.
Re:"designed to be hackable"? (Score:3, Informative)
My iBook would like to have a word with you outside. Actually all Macs that belong to the "New World" generation have had Open Firmware [wikipedia.org]. This stretches all the way to the iMac and the Blue & White Tower, and continues to the last G5 PowerMacs. All iBooks have OF.
EFI [wikipedia.org] has now replaced OF in the MacIntel platform that was introduced with MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro.
Java on the XO laptop (Score:1, Informative)
More details here:
http://frequal.com/java/FirstLookOnTheOlpcXoLaptop.html [frequal.com]