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My dad bought a couple of the OLPC mini-laptops (You buy 2. You get 1, the other is
donated). He messed around with it for a while, then sent it to me to try. I was
not very impressed. Here are my thoughts on the unit.
- It's fairly small, and looks like a Fisher-Price toy. Definitely aimed at kids.
- It is amazingly non-intuitive in almost everything about it. (at least to this 50
year-old kid)
- I couldn't get the blasted thing open at first. The latches that keep it closed are
well hidden.
- It's physically robust, and probably very resistant to being damaged through misuse.
- I couldn't get the networking to connect to my WAP, although it saw lots of other
WAPs in the neighborhood.
- The Black & White display was small, but very crisp.
- I couldn't get to a "Linux" prompt. They've hidden the OS pretty well behind the
custom GUI.
The biggest disappointment for me was that I couldn't connect to my Wireless Access
Point. I have a rather old WAP, but have no trouble connecting to any other machine,
but the OLPC never did see it. it did see several other Wireless ports in my
neighborhood, but could not connect to them when they were encrypted. It reported
that it saw lots of "mesh" network points (my WAP may have been one of them. Who
Knows?), but even tough it said it was "connected" to one of them, I never got any
networking action. If I could have gotten to a CLI, I might have been able to figure
it out, but the GUI hid every drop of Linux from me. <sigh>
I thought perhaps I was just missing something since I'm too darn old, but my 13
year-old nerdette daughter got nowhere either.
All in all, a great disappointment.
--
Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation
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