After using the OLPC XO heavily for the past three weeks for web browsing, pdf reading, and educational game playing (by my 5 year old nephew), I can’t help me get the feeling that the XO was made for its creators, and not for children.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the thing; but how [...]
The OLPC XO has turned out to be a perfect ebook reader for me for the following reasons:
5 hour battery life in black&white mode with xpdf and mzscheme or Firefox and SBCL open
While reading, try out code in Common Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Ruby, Perl…
Take notes while reading
Beautiful screen
Light weight, tiny size
Low cost and durable
DrScheme is very, very close to its 4.0 release. I wanted to try out the newest bits on my OLPC XO using one of the nightly builds, but ran into the same problem as I did last time:
/home/olpc/apps/plt-3.99.0.25/bin/mred: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Some folks [...]
The OLPC project’s vision is to “provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” To help further their goal, the OLPC folks gave us the opportunity to purchase one laptop for ourselves while at the same time purchasing one for a child. Over the past month I’ve read, talked, [...]
Out of the box, the OLPC XO comes loaded to the gills with Python, but sadly, no Lisp!
To remedy that situation I enlisted the help of the kind folks on the PLT discussion list to help me write a script to build the PLT DrScheme (Lisp) development environment for the XO.
This script is responsible for [...]
A week or so ago I ended up on “Luke’s Weblog” reading an article about Forth on the OLPC XO.
The OLCP Wiki has got Forth Lessons for everyone to enjoy. Forth is a pretty neat language!
You may have noticed that although access to the Forth shell is explained on this page, it doesn’t work. The [...]
This page explains how to image your OLPC XO if you have hosed it up somehow.
I’ve followed the steps and it works like a charm.
If you instead only want to upgrade your system to a newer release, you should follow the steps here.
The only official way to get files in and out of the datastore is to drag and drop a single file at a time, and this only works on USB thumbdrives, not on the filesystem.
There is ticket for a workaround using a Python script; if you use an XO, please offer encouragement to get [...]
The OLPC XO Wiki has a questions and answers page. Today I took look at the hardware page and found a few important bits:
JFFS2 compresses your data, performs wear leveling, and manages bad blocks so you don’t need to worry about the fact you are writing to flash.
USB “thumbdrives” should be formatted to FAT32.
Although the [...]