Post-August developer-education hardware availability?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Apr 13, 2007, at 9:44 , Edward Cherlin wrote:
> But your students don't need to work directoly on the OLPC hardware
> unless you are doing hardware design or writing/testing drivers. If
> you want to do Smalltalk or Python programming, or create some hot new
> educational app (I can make several suggestions, and so can a lot of
> other people), you can do it on any Linux system (although Red Hat
> derivatives are currently easier to support than Debian derivatives),
> and on many other platforms besides. The dev Wiki will tell you what
> you need to install.

For "playing around" this might be true - you develop stuff on a  
regular machine and then at the end you can test it on the machine,  
maybe. However, you will be very surprised at the result.

In my experience, the XO is unique enough that you need to test your  
software on the machine itself, *regularly*. The display, the  
processor + graphics, the tablet - it's impossible to judge from a  
normal machine how your software will come out. Even if you have seen  
an XO for real once or twice. For any serious development or design  
you need the hardware.

Maybe if more effort is put into an emulation environment that tries  
to mimic the display and performance characteristics this would be  
less of an issue, but I honestly doubt that. OLPC needs to get  
machines into people's hands if they are interested in quality  
contributions from the outside.

> If you sign up on the demo page
> on the OLPC Wiki, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Demonstrations, I am sure
> that somebody will be willing to come by your school with an XO or two
> at least once a semester.

This is a rather US-centric view. There is only a miniscule amount of  
machines in many countries.

- Bert -