Novel OS Drives the '$100 laptop' 174
jrwr00 writes with a link to a CNN story about the $100 laptop's unique operating system. We've discussed the OLPC's UI before but the article offers a few new piece of information on the project, which is expected to roll out this year. From the article: "The XO machines are still being tweaked, and [OLPC UI] Sugar isn't expected to be tested by any kids until February. By July or so, several million are expected to reach Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and the Palestinian territory. Negroponte said three more African countries might sign on in the next two weeks. The Inter-American Development Bank is trying to get the laptops to multiple Central American countries."
Where are the apps? (Score:2, Interesting)
A platform exists only to run the apps, not visa-versa. BeOS was a great platform, too. Many excellent gaming platforms have failed, because they lacked apps (i.e., games). Linux desktop is getting nowhere, despite it's technical excellence, because it lacks key apps (i.e., Office). Pull a few key apps from MacOS X (e.g., Office, Photoshop, etc.) and see what happens to adoption.
And all those platforms have far, far more apps available than OLPC (just look at sf.net, download.com or cdw.com). I know OLPC runs a flavor of Linux, but no known Linux apps are compatible with the specs above (Sugar, mesh networking, etc.). Go into a shopping mall and give a random person an OLPC -- what would they do with it? Sure, it has some included apps, but that can't be sufficient to meet the needs of millions of kids with every need and in every environment imaginable.
I hope OLPC works out great, but I can't imagine anyone who has ever designed systems looks at this and thinks anything else but -- great platform, but for what applications?
Where can I find the "Sugar" Windowmanager or DE? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Better internationalization support than KDE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Most insightful thing I've read in a while (Score:2, Interesting)
The $100 laptop hardware may be designed and destined for the 3rd world - but the interface could be put to use anywhere
Anything which allows kids to explore and extend their imaginations whilst learning should be embraced wholeheartedly.
Re:Where are the apps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bluh? Is OpenOffice.org that bad on Linux? Admittedly I've only ever used it on Windows and OpenBSD, and can't really compare it to Microsoft Office since I've never actually used that (mostly because I've never had to)...
Re:Where are the apps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, a collaboration plugin for abiword is being worked on, that will use the mesh infrastructure and sugar presence framework to find and communicate with other users. This will allow realtime collaboration on documents (for example, 2 or more children working on an assingment simultaneously).
So there you have an application that takes full use of the offered platform.
Sun should take a lesson. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=sugar;a=tree [laptop.org]
I just tried it out, and I am pleasantly surprised! It's amazing how much faster Python is for desktop applications than Java is. Even when using IBM's SWT for developing Java applications, they still feel far more bloated and slower-responding than OLPC's Python-based GUI applications.
I would have expected Python to be slower than Java, but apparently that is not the case. It could be that the layers upon layers that make up Swing really slow it down. Maybe it's time for Sun to take a page from OLPC's Sugar project, and develop a UI framework that is fast and easy to use.
Screenshot (Score:3, Interesting)
Lameness filter is a lameness filter
Source code is here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OLPC Sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
What you are describing is not "engineered obsolescence" but "engineered failure," and indeed is hard to imagine manufacturer's doing. Obsolescence != failure.
Engineered obsolescence means that the manufacturer's product roadmap is such that the product bought today is superceded by better products in a relatively short timeframe, enticing people to keep buying over and over again.
Re:Sun should take a lesson. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where can I get one? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because a major reason for the low price is that they aren't doing the kind of packaging and marketing, etc., they'd need to do for individual sales, the cost would be significantly higher than $100 (or even the $150 that looks like it will be the "early adopter" cost) if it were sold to individuals, without any excess to put toward a subsidy.
That being said, OLPC is looking at making a somewhat more expensive and capable derivative system for sale to the public in the US and other advanced countries, but its a secondary priority.
Re:Shouldn't it use the ODF for word processing? (Score:2, Interesting)
I love this (Score:2, Interesting)