OLPC Laptop - an open source substandard ?

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Thomas?,

thomasasta at gmx.net wrote:
> we all want the best for the OLPC project. So we discuss things and
> do the best we can. [...]
> Back to the laptop equipment, which is indeed a question of education
> (and so adresses as well to the project managers). In my opinon we do
> not need a sub-standard for the requesting countries.

Sorry, but you are about a year too late to influence decisions about
software and hardware.

The hardware will NOT change for the few million units which will be
shipped next year. If we changed the hardware, it would throw us
back at least 10 months. The hardware is not fast, but it is the best
you can buy for that price. Alternatives are slower or need more
power.
The software can still change, but not in the way you suggest.

> we do not need a sub-standard for the requesting countries.
> So it should be Open-Office-Word and not ABi-Word

Openoffice is sub-standard. Too slow and too bloated. An embedded
variant of Abiword may the the word processing software we use.
Please stop suggesting things which can NOT work and concentrate
on things where you may be competent (wireless?).

> So the wireless mesh is the main issue. It would be nice, to have it 
> - open source to guarantee free developement, 

See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/46 for details.

> - and it would be nice to have it self-organizing in assigning IP
>   adresses

AFAIK it already does that.

Most of your questions and complaints are already answered in the wiki.
If you want to be constructive, please read through all old OLPC
community newsletters at http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf
and the wiki at http://wiki.laptop.org/ .
After you have read all available information and stopped flaming,
you can maybe help rewrite the mesh routing software (ticket 46) so
that it is completely open source. But be careful: that is not as
easy as flaming.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel