Status of the OLPC

[Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu]

> Depends on what you mean by 'polishing'. :)

Its certainly a variable term. :) Certainly a lot of work is done and quite
impressive. I've only been on the list a few days, it just seemed to me that
there are quite a few things left vs what the public website would lead to
believe. 

I ran into something simple - ie if no sound is present it goes into an
infinite half-reboot cycle. Now all devices might have audio and it was
because I was using Bochs, but it seems that it should handle that better.
But then watching other notes and on searches it seems there are quite a few
things like this left. 

That's why I'm inquiring, just trying to get a feel for what is left.

> Our ship code (one of the many milestones we have reached) is stable,
> works quite well and is complete for what it tries to do. It doesn't
> fill all the features we have planned for the 'Grand Scheme Of Things',
> but it a big first step. Sharing activities works, discovering users

Oh sure - there will always be more features. :)

> prompting. The hardware is amazingly solid, reliable, efficient and
> environmentally friendly. The folks at OLPC have made a great product,
> that will--even if they stopped writing code today--go a long way
> toward changing the world.

If one wants to develop - what are the options for getting hardware outside
of North America?

Will the emulation "Builds" be improved? Emulation seems a great way to
involve more people, but we should have some better way. It seems many
builds don't work "out of the box" and most require a bit of tweaking to
run. Id like to see an option where we have ready to go Bochs/VMWare/VPC
whatever images for people to see. I think this would go a long way.... I'll
even volunteer to help.