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 networksBrowse - 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? 🙂
Did you get your T-mobile stuff in the box too? Or did they email it to you?
I want my XO 🙁
The OLPC (hardware) seems to be a cool little device by the looks of it, but I have not used the hardware yet so I really cant tell for sure.
I have however toyed a bit with the UI (Sugar) using an Emulator (as I plan to do some development for it). Maybe it’s the Emulators speed (and lack of special input devices) but I cant imagine working a longer time with it. It gives me the feeling of working with a straitjacket in a confined space. Ditching the desktop concept for some new experimental concept does not seem like the best thing to do.
To give you an example:
Say you are writing your homework and you need to access the calculator or web once in a while to solve it. In this case you cant organize the workplace so the applications you need are visible at the same time. Instead you have to first minimize the current “Activity” go to the “Activities” chooser and select the next one to use.
I can see the motive for having Sugar this way is to make it easier for small children. But I have not encountered any child yet that had a problem understanding a traditional desktop environment. That said I think it has some nice touches as the mesh networking and network neighborhood support, and I’m a big fan of the technologies used (Python, pygtk, pygame etc.)
The “activities”(applications) may be at a very early stage at this time but it seems to be a lot of software by nerds for nerds. I’m sure that it will improve over time (it will just take a little extra time as they need to port existing apps to Sugar).
If MS is going to make XP available for it I think that a real desktop environment (like XFCE) should be available to give the XO (Linux) users freedom of choice.
That said I am a big fan of the OLPC and I will continue my attempt to develop Sugar Activities for it.
I cannot connect to encrypted networks with passwords which I know (unencrypted ones work fine.) Any ideas?
I received an E-mail with my T-mobile information and a reference code to sign up for the 12 months free.
Unfortunately, t-mobile says its invalid.
Bill
@ Bill – I had that too the first time I submitted the code, but I double checked and tried again and its been approved since. Not sure what the problem was, but it eventually validated.
There’s a workaround for the problems connecting to WPA-secured networks here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WPA_Manual_Setting
It’s a little bit complex, but the instructions, precisely followed, worked for me.
T-Mobile apparently didn’t have their act together initially. A remaining problem was that their login required java, which doesn’t run by default on the sugar browser. I haven’t tried the t-mobile option yet, so I don’t know whether they finally have the kinks worked out or not.
Xfce works on the Xo and so does OpenOffice.