XO-LiveCD - it's fun but needs the power of Puppy

[raffy]

This is another fun project for you: an OLPC live CD that can run quite well in 512-MB RAM PC (it says 800 mhz or higher processor is needed).

Item 16 of Laptop News 2007-12-08 announced it. See the download sites below.

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
• provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

as: XO-LiveCD_<date>.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

TIPS: The desktop allows playing of one program (activity) at a time. if you click on the "Activity" at the top left, sometimes an X will appear at the top right to close the application. Most program access is done by the mouse only. If you can't exit a program, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and the desktop will restart. Activities are logged by the journal, so don't visit p**n sites.

ITEMS of INTEREST: Some applications are wonderful, else most seem to be cutdown or modified versions of the originals. The LiveBackup CD does the familiar Puppy tricks (big file is loaded to RAM when available).

FUNNY - The poll questions disappeared, and when I updated them, the options got duplicated. Now the whole poll is gone.

[Lobster]

review of OLPC from UK 9 year old
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7140443.stm

[raffy]

From: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24682

Subject description: OLPC XO and Puppy Linux, probably not worth the time.

I received my 2 XO units last night. I must say that I think Puppy Linux would have been a better choice for the OS. Even with the Sugar interface replaced by a more "normal" interface, Puppy under the hood would be more responsive than the tweaked version of Fedora.

Many design decisions of the XO are intentionally "anti-average consumer", like the itty-bitty keyboard and the Sugar interface. This, combined with the lack of availability and support for the average person will continue to limit the XO to the educational realm.

IMHO, work on Puppy Linux is better spent on avenues away from the XO. Puppy is quite possibly the "OS for everyone". The XO is clearly not aimed at "everyone", but only at a limited set of students in a limited set of countries.