SemiConscious Dot Org

At long last, the final present of Christmas 2007 has finally arrived: I hold in my hot little hands none other than an XO laptop. In fact, I’m writing this post on it!

No, my hand is not in the foreground. It really is that tiny.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the One Laptop Per Child program, the rather ambitious aim of which is to put $100 $200 laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations worldwide. For a short time last year, they ran a special “Give One Get One” promotion, wherein you could purchase one XO for yourself if you also purchased one for donation to a child in the developing world. On the very last day of the G1G1 program, yours truly, deciding he needed to both repair his fractured karma and purchase a new toy, plunked down the mad scrilla.

Last night, it finally arrived.

All the crazy stories you’ve heard about this machine are true: the screen really is visible outdoors in direct sunlight, the twin wifi antennas really can pull in a signal from a ridiculously long distance, the touchpad really can be used as a writing tablet with a stylus, it really is impervious to dust and heat, and it really does have no hard drive (all internal storage is handled by a combination of ROM and flash memory.) This is an amazingly well-designed piece of hardware.

The software, however, is another story. It’s a special, stripped-down version of Fedora Linux called Sugar, and it’s designed to be very simple for kids to use. I think it’s a little too simple, personally: installing new software is very difficult. The visual look of the GUI is like no operating system you’ve ever seen, so different in fact that it’s quite jarring. And the included web browser is just hideous: it’s slow, breaks formatting, and forget about playing embedded audio or video content.

However, all of these things are fixable. The good folks at Opera have already created a version of their browser specially modified for use on the XO, which I was able to install in just a few quick steps. And lo and behold, there are already several hacks for installing Ubuntu as an alternative operating system, to give the laptop a much more grown-up feel. (There are even rumors that the Redmond Borg Collective will attempt to shoehorn XP onto the XO, but I prefer to pretend that’s just a horrible, horrible nightmare.)

So, yeah: a qualified thumbs up. It’s not a mobile workstation, but it ain’t a toy, either. And it was cheap and it helps out kids in need. I heartily approve of both the concept and the execution of this program.

I’d say run out and buy one immediately, but you can’t. The Give One Get One ended on December 31st, and there are no plans to revive it. I am, and will always continue to be, the only person you know who has one of these babies. Ha ha!

You can still give one to a kid in a Third World country, however. So go do it, you stingy bastard! Now! What are you waiting for?