The “Break it Down” Blog

Preston Lee blogs about Marc Chung’s newest toy: An OLPC.

Notice from the picture above that Marc has been cursed with a disease that makes his hands roughly the size of Christmas hams… or the OLPC might just be a lot smaller than I expected (more shots here of Marc’s OLPC, thanks Preston!)

Below is Marc’s full review:

Built on Linux (RedHat Fedora), but you’d never tell if you didn’t
recognize the X.org arrow cursor, or the secret short cut key which
drops you out of X. Or the terminal icon on the dock (which I just
frickin noticed)

The user interface is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s very simple
to use, almost like a Mac (comes with a Dock).

The keyboard is ultra small and so is the mouse pad. Your fingers
will not fit on the home row. It’s made for kids. The keyboard is
made of rubber, so I’m guessing it takes a beating. For fun, I
plugged in my MS Trackball mouse and it worked flawlessly.

Also, they removed the CapsLock button and replaced it with Ctrl,
which is something I do on all my computers. Hooray for not causing
RSI in third world countries!!

Has audio, plays video, comes with a camera and built in speakers for
recording. Even has a Photobooth like application. It’s a very cool
piece of hardware for creating all sorts of content..

The apps are dead easy to use, but of course, a little childish.
Calculator, Recording studio, Write, Paint, etc. I haven’t been able
to get the Network apps up and running, but there’s a Browser and a Chat client.

The browser is Firefox, though I’ve seen a few postings by H&kon Lie on a Laptop dev
mailing list, so I’m almost sure an Opera client is in the works.

Comes with not one, but two software development environments. Logo
(my first programming language) and Python; both being awesome
introductions to programming and programming languages..

You can flip the screen around and toggle the orientation with a hard button.

That’s all for now. I just found the Terminal, so I’ll be ditzing
around with internals..