OLPC XO-3 on slashdot front page right now

[Chris Leonard]

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 8:56 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 1:15 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 11:46 PM, Alexandro Colorado <acolorado at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> We talked about it on the IRC chat, however there is a lot of
>>> missconceptions like the crank meme, and now andorid.
>>>
>>> Why would we want a >13yr old kid in 3rd world to go to the android
>>> store to buy apps, get a google account and use G+.
>>>
>>> Just doesnt seem right.
>>
>>
>> Please consider the very pragmatic argument that one *really* good
>> reason to have Android on the demo of the XO-3 tablet at an event as
>> well publicized as CES is that neither Sugar or Gnome have yet
>> implemented all that neat touch-interface, tablet stuff like virtual
>> keyboards, etc. whereas all of this has been present in Android for
>> some time.
>
> I agree with your "pragmatic argument", but... I am almost certain
> that what is being demoed on the XO-3.0 at CES is in fact Sugar
> running on Fedora. And it works pretty well. (OLPC did some tweaking
> for the demo.) That doesn't mean there isn't lots more work to be done
> (one of the reasons (as you note below) that we are pushing hard on
> GTK-3, since the GNOME community is also working in this problem
> space). There is a virtual keyboard for Sugar (but not in the build
> being demoed at CES) and not integrated to the point it needs be...
> but I did, for example, make a modification to Turtle Art for CES so
> that number blocks can be changes w/o a keyboard.

That is really nice to hear.  I had a feeling that the touchscreen
XO-1.75 prototypes weren't just gathering dust, but I hadn't seen
signs of the patches to support touchscreen land (or maybe I missed
them).  So we are farther along that I had imagined, that is great
news.

I can imagine the Sugar 097 > 0.98 dev cycle will see some priority
feature additions to flesh out support for tablets (the same way that
0.95 > 0.96 has been GTK-focused).  That is as it should be, OLPC is
obviously a very important "channel partner' for the distribution of
Sugar.

>>
>> Demo'ing Sugar on the tablet at this point would probably require
>> plugging in a keyboard and a mouse, which would be a little
>> embarrassing in front of all of the press corps.
>
> Nope. Just need to avoid a few widgets and activities that require typing.

Cool, we don't want it to look like a Raspberry Pi after all, real
cheap "computer", but you need to add monitor, keyboard and mouse to
use it.

cjl