Ever since Shakthi and I got a chance to meet [1] the KMR Foundation folks and check the OLPC hardware and sugar interface, I had an urge to try it out on my PC. Fedora made life easy with a sugar spin [2] but I had a tough time using the interface, partly because I am used to the "window" desktop environment and the numerous seg faults.
As I looked into the details of the project, I found what I think are anomalies. This mail is my attempt to seek clarifications, understand the context and reduce my ignorance on the same. 1) The XOs are x86 based running on the AMD Geode family of processors. Any specific reason for choosing x86 over ARM (both being low power processors)? Doesn't the equation change with projects like Android [3] and Meego [4] in the fray? Not only does these have big companies backing it, there is also a larger community to support efforts and a fairly open store for content and apps. Meego supports both ARM and x86 and seems to have a cleaner UI. Though the XO is touted to have very good battery backup, it didn't seem so. The battery backup was only as good as a netbook and the XO was fuming in a moderately air conditioned environment. 2) Why is the OLPC project bound to hardware vendors? Is it to make application development easy or to benefit (probably as a very small token of appreciation) the vendors who have invested (and donated) millions of dollars in the project? 3) Is the sugar interface relevant even now? I find it really hard to use and as hard (or easy) as to develop upon when compared with any other toolkit. It's true that I am not the intended audience for Sugar but projects like K12LTSP, Edubuntu and Swecha have had a good impact in the educational field. These projects have quite a lot of applications and most importantly content. On the other hand, the sugar interface didn't even have translations for some of the most basic strings nor even a management interface for course instructors or administrators. Is this just a case of the NIH syndrome [5] (the other projects that I have compared with too seem to suffer from the same) or am I really missing something fundamental. PS: Most facts here are based on results fetched off a search engine and might be inaccurate at this point in time. [1] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ilughyd/message/20825 [2] http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/ [3] http://www.android.com/ [4] http://meego.com/ [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here -- Cheers Thejaswi Puthraya http://thejaswi.info/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
