Tag: olpc

Eee!

Ok, you knew it had to happen. I picked up an EeePC 8g from the guys down at PC Cyber. So far, I have to say, I think it’s very cool. I was looking for a sub-notebook to carry around in my MEC bag, and this fits it perfectly. But wait, you say, what about … Continue reading “Eee!”

Ok, you knew it had to happen. I picked up an EeePC 8g from the guys down at PC Cyber. So far, I have to say, I think it’s very cool. I was looking for a sub-notebook to carry around in my MEC bag, and this fits it perfectly.

But wait, you say, what about the OLPC XO? Wasn’t that going to be your sub-notebook?

Well, yes, that was the plan. But after several months of using the XO, too many of its limitations became irksome, and the things that make it great (i.e. the educational software, the mesh networking, the kid friendly case) just weren’t useful to me.

So here I am with the Eee. It’s still got limited storage (but more than the XO — 8Gig + 4 on an SDHC), a really small (not outdoor readable) screen, and it runs a funky front end onto xandros (not Ubuntu, although that’s pretty easy to get going) but despite that it seems to be a much better fit for me. It comes with all of the software that I would use on a day to day basis, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Lightening, Java, FBReader… you name it.

Plus, I managed to get it to

  • sync calendar entries with the rest of my Macs
  • hold (but not sync) all my address book entries
  • mount my iPod (and my 120Gig USB laptop drive)
  • run eReader under Wine (so that I can read my DRM’ed eBooks)
  • …

Heck, I even got it to run Eclipse, and you know, it actually runs well enough to be usable, although it takes some careful tweaking to get enough screen real estate to run Eclipse on a 480×800 display. (Hint: “Toggle Toolbar Visibility” is your friend.)

[Latest find: a site that explains how to connect to LEAP/PEAP networks. I’ll have to try that at some point.]

The only real negatives I’ve found so far are the battery life which is somewhere between 2 and 3 hours, and the fact that it has a fan. The fan doesn’t run all the time, but when it does start up, man is it loud. At full speed it sounds like a hairdryer.

Btw, the small keyboard is not a negative. In addition to being a lot larger than the one on the XO, it’s actually large enough for me to touch type on without difficulty, now that I’ve gotten used to it.

Anyway, this is the proverbial first post from the Eee. I guess, if nothing else, the length of it indicates that the keyboard really is usable. I’ll let you know how well it works out once I’ve had it for a few weeks.

Some more OLPC XO notes

Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it: It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was … Continue reading “Some more OLPC XO notes”

Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it:

  • It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was bound to be heavy. It would really be too heavy to be an eBook reader, if I wasn’t pudgy enough to have a “belly shelf” to put it on. 😉
     
  • The keyboard is too small to type on. It is, of course, too small for my adult hands, but it even seemed small when my 11 year-old nephew was playing with it. I understand that the size (and the lime-green color) were intended to make it less appealing to adult thieves. I guess will see. To me it’s no worse than learning the Treo or the iPod Touch keyboards. In this case, 2 fingers from each hand + the right thumb on the space bar is working for me.
     
  • There’s something odd about the trackpad. It seems to get in a mode where it causes the cursor to jump to one corner of the screen every time you lift your finger off the surface. Whatever it is, Jeff noticed the problem on his as well, so it’s not a hardware problem with mine.
     
  • FBReader works better than I thought it would. I installed it by finding an RPM that started with “fbreader” at http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/ and then getting it with a command like: 
        rpm -ivh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader...

    (Note: You probably have to be su’ed to do that.)
    To start it, you type “FBReader” at the shell prompt. To exit, you hit “cntrl-Q”. The default font, font sizes, margin spacing, and keybindings all need to be adjusted on first use, but the values are remembered so it’s not a big deal. It may just be personal taste, but I find the resulting experience to be more pleasing than using the built in PDF reader. In any case, it’s certainly faster.
     

  • The SD slot seems to work fine. The way I tested FBReader was by sticking in an old 256Meg SD card I had used with one of my previous Palms, which was full of eBooks. It mounted as “/media/SD256” (because the volume label was “SD256”), and when I told FBReader that “/media/SD256/palm/Books” was on the library path it found the 4 unencrypted DOC format books that were there.
     
  • Wireless is definitely an issue. After several hours of attempting to get it to connect via WEP to my Airport Extreme, including following the instructions of people who have gotten it to work, I have given up. The claim is that the XO can’t speak WPA yet, but there also seems to be a counter-example. I may switch over to WPA and try that, but for now I just stuck a Linksys “USB200M ver.2” USB-to-wired-ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports. This worked without problem, and at least seems to be faster than using wireless anyway.