Negroponte Says Windows 'Runs Well' On XO Laptop 339
Stony Stevenson alerts us to comments from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte indicating his approval of Windows' performance on the XO laptop. Negroponte said in an email, "Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and to run under Windows." The full email is available at OLPC News. He was also quoted by the Associated Press as saying that Sugar "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way," and cited the lack of Flash as an example. Negroponte continued, "There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community. One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."
Flash message for NN (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Screw Sugar (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest problem is the Journal. Personally I find it far more confusing than a hierarchical file system. More often than not I find myself using the terminal which, by the way, doesn't seem to allow copy and paste.
A conventional computer isn't hard to figure out, even for the very young. Beyond basic functionality, I think sugar will hinder learning more than anything, given how tough it can be to do even very basic things.
Re:And with this... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Two models (Score:5, Informative)
The performance is fine. He even plays a few fps games on it.
Sadly, Negroponte is correct... (Score:4, Informative)
Quote: "Adobe makes the official Flash plugin, but OLPC cannot ship it on the XOs because it is legally restricted and doesn't meet the OLPC's standards for open software. Instead, the XO ships with Gnash, an open source Flash plugin that can play some (but not all) Flash content. As shipped on the XO, it cannot play YouTube videos. Skilled users can rebuild it to include that functionality."
The Sugar distribution's exclusion of Flash, and only shipping a crippled version of Gnash, is all about open source politics, not technical performance limitations.
Re:Screw Sugar (Score:3, Informative)
WPA has been working for me - but only with the 703 releace candidate build (which kindly removed all my Activities, including Browse because it was a "clean" release. Whatever -- it was easy enough to restore them.
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Informative)
open a terminal
su (sudo doesn't exist)
(wait a few seconds usually)
it'll then try for a DHCP IP and either work or not.
Yeah, it sucks, but hey -- it's probably not a common use case for their actual target market.
Re:Fartknocker (Score:3, Informative)
A generic insulting noun, coined by Butthead of MTV's Beavis and Butthead.
While they were watching the premier of GWAR's "Saddam a Go-Go" video, Beavis got in Butthead's line of view of the TV. Butthead shouted "Move it, fartknocker!"
Re:No, Flash is Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, if you really need flash, install it! It works! It's even listed in the laptop.org wiki, as well as multiple threads and howtos at OLPCNews' forums; including a good tip on improving flash video performance: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=845.0 [olpcnews.com]
(sidenote: I just got back from a trip and used a custom mplayer build to watch movies for the whole flight - woot)
Re:Power Power Power and infrastructure (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Screw Sugar (Score:5, Informative)
The other shoe drops (Score:4, Informative)
The Bayless "Freeplay" radio began with many of the same ideals as OLPC. But it is tough to hold your ground when the OEM giants see opportunities in the same market.
It would be easy for OLPC to go the same way as the Simputer. [wikipedia.org]
You can't hold the line on costs. Your sales projections are unrealistic.
You have a solid platform for development but not much else. The mass-market alternative is leaping ahead of your own technology and is compatible with an enormous library of existing software.
Grammar and Vocabulary (Score:2, Informative)
I generally share your annoyance at the misuse of words.
However, you can be an open source fundamentalist, and it might be exactly what he meant. A fundamentalist is someone who stresses strict and literal adherence to a set of basic (fundamental) principles (see Merriam-Webster's second definition [merriam-webster.com] - the one that doesn't specifically refer to modern American Evangelical Christianity). So, an open-source fundamentalist would be a person who stresses strict adherence to the basic principles of "open source." I suppose what principles those are is somewhat debatable, but if they include the idea that all software should be open source (or at least a preference that it should be if not a mandate), then his use of "fundamentalist" could be appropriate, if what he means is that they advocate strict adherence to these principles.
A "fanatic [merriam-webster.com]," on the other hand, is a person "marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion." An "open-source fanatic" would be someone who is very enthusiastic about open source, and is uncritically devoted to it, not necessarily someone who advocates strict adherence to its basic principles.
Exactly.
However, since you're pointing out flaws in others' vocabulary, I hope it will not be rude of me to point out a flaw in your own: an open source fundamentalist without the hyphen between open and source would be a "source fundamentalist" who is open. With the hyphen, "open-source" modifies fundamentalist. Without it, "open" modifies "source fundamentalist."
Re:Isn't Microsoft out to destory OLPC? (Score:2, Informative)
So even there is no overt conspiracy to destroy the OLPC ( Just like politicos do not really want to undo democracy ) , the tactics that Microsoft/Intel use implicitly aim to damage it.
Living in a third world nation, I want to convey that it is not difficult to come across a computer. However, It is next to impossible to find one that acts as anything but an impenetrable black box.
Re:Sadly, Negroponte is correct... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Isn't Microsoft out to destory OLPC? (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, it is the project which spawned Microsoft creating Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition.
LoB
Re:Then why not use ARM? (Score:1, Informative)
Almost everything besides the kernel itself practically needs forking in order to even BUILD for arm.
Expect the code to require small modifcations, and the build systems to require large and detailed mods.
How much do you like working with other people's autotools hacks?
Most OSS / GNU projects are written by people never expecting to need cross-compilation at all, and most ARM systems aren't big enough to run a full GNU on linux stack anyway, so almost all currently existing arm compatible projects expect to be cross built on an X86 machine anyway.
The problem is that ARM isn't an architecture... it's a fucking whole family of slightly compatible architectures. Are you using armV5TE? armV5TEL? armv4t? armv9? m7? maybe you're using a gnu OABI linking system? or the new EABI linking system which is supposed to fix compatibility between slightly different armv4 - 5 varients?
The problem also is, that different arm platforms have quite different architectures around the processor - arm is often integrated into different Soc's.
They boot off different devices in different ways. Often you need one of about 3 different boot loaders to even boot linux, often even eCos is used to boot linux because it can handle lower level details of the platform you're on.
I have worked on an arm system, so i'm familiar with the problems.
Say you are using GTK+, only your application programmer decides to use C++ bindings.
Guess what - there is currently no support for C++ GTK+ bindings for any arm platform - and no interest in adding such support.
We gave up on arm and went with AMD's low power geode chipset - just as OLPC did.
And you know what? All of a sudden we can just run ubuntu.
Application development becomes a snap, and there are excellent build management systems like gentoo to manage building a reduced OSS stack from vanilla tarballs.
Saved a hell of a lot of problems.
ARM is nice, but it's just not appropriate to use a linux under GNU stack on, and it's not linux's fault - the kernel works perfectly and support for peripherals is extremely complete.
What fails it is the lack of support with the rest of the software stack.
And when people say linux, they do really mean "linux with a GNU system on top".
Which is why, if you look at any arm linux system, you never see a full desktop style distro - because it's just too much support to fork every damn dependancy that you would need.
Hell, most arm linux build system assume you're building on an x86 anyway.
And if you try building natively - good luck to you, it's usually so much slower you can spent all day just getting the toolchain to work.
And you're pretty much stuck doing it all LFS style.
The situation is slightly better on armv5te devices, if only because the majority of porting work for arm happened mostly for the first few devices using that subvariant.
Things like the sharp zaurus family work fairly well, because they have communities to support them.
God help you if you're building your own device. Especially on a custom variant of arm.
If you must use arm, for the power savings, then you should stick with a rtos - eCos springs to mind.
Use that, and write everything from scratch, it's just not time effective to borrow from OSS projects.
ARM is mostly better treated as a very powerful micro controller rather than an easy alternative for x86 as a linux platform.
I haven't tried them, but you might be better off with powerPC or MIPS. At least there are serious desktop systems based on those architectures. The last desktop based on arm was an old armv4 subvariant - without the support for thumb code that is required for EABI.
Or if you must use OSS, use an x86 arch which is PC compatible.
Save your development costs for your application, for you must have something specific in mind to be bothering with a low power system anyway.