I’ve been tinkering with the XO laptop this morning and I thought I’d share some specs with everyone that is interested. I’m still exploring the machine, but here are some interesting details that I found. I’ve included hardware details from processor, memory and hard disk to software details including running kernel, included software, etc. It’s a really impressive little tool. This is one great representation of what Free Software can do!
Machine Specs
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 5
model : 10
model name : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 430.960
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 sep pge cmov clflush mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 862.98
clflush size : 32
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 237844 kB
MemFree: 48172 kB
Buffers: 0 kB
Cached: 87496 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 107988 kB
Inactive: 59784 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 80296 kB
Mapped: 24764 kB
Slab: 15088 kB
SReclaimable: 4568 kB
SUnreclaim: 10520 kB
PageTables: 792 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 118920 kB
Committed_AS: 140844 kB
VmallocTotal: 794604 kB
VmallocUsed: 17740 kB
VmallocChunk: 776592 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ df -Th
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mtd0 jffs2 1.0G 333M 692M 33% /
tmpfs tmpfs 35M 0 35M 0% /dev/shm
The machine comes with built-in wireless, three USB ports, headphone and microphone jacks and an SD card reader. A set of built-in speakers, an integrated camera for doing still or video shots. Touchpad and nearly full (very small!) keyboard. Some of the other things I’ve found are that they screen can not only be physically rotated (180 degrees) and laid down for display there is also a software rotate button to rotate the contents of the screen. The rotate button rotates the screen contents through four different directions.
It was very easy to connect the XO to my wireless network (no encryption). Wired connection can be done via a USB-to-ETH0 adaptor if needed. Connecting my USB mouse worked just fine. Attaching a vfat USB device connected fine as well as a an ext3. The vfat was recognized by Sugar and allowed me to “umount” via the Journal activity. The ext3 automounted but I could only seem to find it from the Terminal activity (yes, OLPC prefers to call applications “activities”).
Software Info
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ uname -r
2.6.22-20071121.7.olpc.af3dd731d18bc39
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
[olpc@xo-10-AC-5E ~]$ uname -a
Linux xo-10-AC-5E.localdomain 2.6.22-20071121.7.olpc.af3dd731d18bc39 #1 PREEMPT Wed Nov 21 00:39:06 EST 2007 i586 i586 i386 GNU/Linux
The software is really pretty intuitive I think and once you figure out the basics it supports multi-tasking pretty well. You can launch multiple applications “Activities” and then switch back to “Home” to see them on the circular status bar. Some of the applications “Activities” available:
Chat - for use, as far as I can tell, between XO machines over the Mesh networks
Browse - simple web browser, defaults to Google search
Write - document creator complete with fonts and formatting tools
Record - still, video and audio recording tool
Paint - simple graphic editor-type application "activity" 
Pippy - I really like this one, its a Python learning tool. Shows example code that can be edited and teaches basic Python
Calculator - basic and advanced calculator
Measure - measure aucoustic frequencies and visually see the wavelengths
Memorize - a basic memory game matching integrating mathematics
News Reader - RSS reader
Terminal - basic shell, and the first application I found (does that say something about me?)
Analyze - analyze basic interface information
Acoustic Tape Measure - measure a distance (in meters) between two XO machines!
More!
It should be noted that this is not really a “production” laptop. This is an educational tool. Don’t get one of these if you want a small, lightweight machine. Its for kids–even the keyboard is kid-size. Young kids that want an educational teaching tool are a great market for this (and, of course, the educational goals of the 3rd world as the primary goal!). “This is an education project, not a laptop project” – Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC.
There is still time left in the Give One, Get One program if you have children that this would be a good tool for. Also, if you’d like to do development for the project it’d be a good fit. Remember, the Give One, Get One program donates one of these machines to a developing nation and also gives one to you. Now is the season for giving, right? 