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The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospectiveThe Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospectivePosted Dec 27, 2008 17:37 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective I think the editor is right about the danger of the olpc being obsolete. I bought a g1g1 to be a teaching toy for my niece and to read rss feeds in bed. Sugar's UI taught my niece more about computers than I intended (can't figure out how to save her work to a usb key, can't print it, can't email it, it's locked inside the olpc forever), and its horrid battery life and glacial boot times prevented use as an rss reader. My niece is now a proficient Mac user and I read feeds on my G1 (typing on it now). The olpc has sat idle on the dusty shelf for a year now... I'm not quite sure what to do with it. :-/
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The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective Posted Dec 27, 2008 20:32 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
to copy things off of the olpc plug in a USB stick, go to the journal, select a document, hit copy, select the USB stick (at the bottom of the screen), select paste.
as far as printing goes, that is still a problem (although scheduled to be fixed in the march software update, at least to some extent)
you need to differentiate between teh hardware becoming obsolete and the horible problems the software has (not as bad as it used to be, but still pretty bad)
the good news is that you can now run other linux distros on the olpc, so you aren't locked in to Sugar.
there are how-to documents for installing ubunto, debian, gentoo and fedora on the machine, so you can choose your favorite flavor
The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective Posted Dec 28, 2008 16:31 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sugar is available as a set of Fedora packages (at least in rawhide). So you could hop in and help make it better.
The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective Posted Dec 28, 2008 16:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you really should not attack people on your side (at least partially).
I was responding to a post that voiced the opinion that the XO is becoming obsolete (and listed many Sugar problems as justification). this is a person who went out of their way to conribute by spending their hard earned money to pay double price for a device.
your response annoys people the same way that a bug report that's responded with a message that says 'patches are welcome' annoys people
attacking people who contribute becouse you don't think that they contribute enough (or in the 'right way') harms the community for more than it ever helps.
I have purchased 6 XOs through the G1G1 program (two for my own use/testing, four for relatives), I do contribute (via testing)
however, that's not necessarily the important point.
the OLPC people decided to deploy a system that is in many ways unusable (for the reasons that were in the message I replied to), and they made it worse by doing so in a way that made it very hard to use any of the standard tools. they then push the result as the most user friendly version ever.
while I test Sugar (on the stripped down Fedora shipped with the OLPC) I think that this combination is a big mistake, and I'm not interested in spending a lot of time trying to convince Fedora to change when there are other distros that give me a much better starting point, so I spend more time working with the other distros that I can run on the XO.
OLPC Sugar problems Posted Dec 28, 2008 17:29 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sorry if it sounded that way. I was just trying to point out to other readers here that interested parties can help out with the interface without owning an OPLC themselves.
OLPC Sugar problems Posted Dec 29, 2008 0:50 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
sorry for taking your comment in ways you didn't intend. I just have had too many times when a discussion of tools has gone
person 1: X has these problems try using Y
person 2: why don't you contribute code to fix X instead
sometimes the right answer isn't to work on product X to 'fix' it (in some cases the 'fix' is in direct conflict with the goals of project X), but to just switch to a different option
The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:15 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> I spend more time working with the other distros that I can run on the XO.
Now this is interesting. What distro do you find to be the most usable? Is there anything that will sleep when the laptop is closed, doesn't burn through the battery in an hour, lives agreeably in flash, and only takes an hour or so of my time to install and configure?
In reply to vonbrand, I'm personally uninterested in contributing to Sugar. It feels slow, incomplete, and poorly designed. And I disagree with its claim that existing UIs are so broken that the baby must be chucked out with the bathwater. If it had started as a set of extensions to a tried and true desktop environment (unimportant which one), I feel the XO would have been generally usable by now and the whole project would have seen far more momentum. Alas.
The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:56 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'm mostly running them from USB sticks at the moment (since I'm experimenting with several options)
that being said, I have had the best results so far with the debxo images (debian)
I expect the ubuntu option to work about as well, but the one image I tried didn't want to work from the USB (looks like a bootloader being hard-coded for the SD card slot, but I haven't tried it yet)
all the debian options and the ubuntu option are small enough to fit in the built-in flash (unlike the fedora 10 image)
none of these do power management well yet, the problem is that the OLPC team went their own way (again) and instead of teaching the kernel about the power management options they created a userspace tool that accesses the hardware directly to do the power management. until this gets fixed (which _is_ on a short-term roadmap) it's just about impossible to do power management properly without running the full olpc distro. I see battery life in the 2-3 hour range with no power savings.
but things are changing rapidly, a month or so ago none of these distros was able to access the game keys on the screen, or control the screen brightness and mode. at this point I believe that the XO can run a kernel compiled from raw kernel.org sources (also not possible a few months ago)
it's hit the point where the various options can be used, so more people are trying them, each doing small tweaks to fix things and the results are getting combined.
Sugar is so slow that KDE and Gnome both seem fast by comparison. I don't have enough experiance with LXDE or Awesome to really use them, but they are considerably smaller (and should be faster)
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