[laptop-accessibility] Totally new to the XO . . question about the neighborhood

[Joe]

The neighborhood displays people connected to the laptop's configured "jabber" server (and, presumably, laptops within mesh range).  The reason you are not seeing anyone else in the neighborhood is because the G1G1 laptops ship pointing to a non-functioning jabber server, because the architecture isn't suited to handle the thousands of G1G1 users at once -- and possibly because parents wouldn't want their kids immediately chatting with internet strangers.  You can find instructions for configuring the jabber server in the links on this page:

http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?lmsg_start=36&t=834

Particularly, this link has instructions for setting up your XO to use a server at xochat.org with dozens of XO owners (but not necessarily kids) on it:

http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/olpc_help_g1g_xo_chat.html

The kids in countries with XOs will most likely be set up to chat on local school servers... Which is fine because internet chatting is a little sluggish, and chatting with foreign kids may be otherwise problematic due to language and time zone barriers.  An alternative is the EPals activity (still in development):

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Epals

This is supposed to be an activity that will allow children around the world (not necessarily XO owners) to write to each other...  I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know if it's working yet.