[Olpc-za] News Snippets

[Peter van Heusden]

Here's another interesting blog - which touches on the political economy
of OLPC: http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/countries/. The combined
comments suggest a bit of a catch-22: Quanta needs volume orders to
bring in the OLPC at the $100 or $200 price point, which is why
Negroponte et al are focussing on country-sized customers, which means
engaging with the tendering and political processes of potential
customer countries, which in turn means facing some of the political
challenges, such as convincing an African or South American country to
invest in computers that are being assembled in Changsu, by a Taiwanese
company [1]. So... in order for this idea to fly the XO needs to be a
real *kick ass* item, something that is so obviously right its scary.
And of course this also means pushing back against the "it should run
Windows" meme.

Having said that, I'm trying to fiddle with Sugar running in qemu on
Windows, but haven't had much luck getting the network going (and I need
the network running in qemu so I can feed new data to the emulated XO).
Also I'd like to grow the disk image to give me more space to play with
- any idea if this is possible? My other option is getting Sugar running
separately (probably on my oldish FreeBSD box) - anyone had success with
that?

Peter

[1] http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/production/quanta_building_cm1.html

P.S. mini-intro - I'm an ex-co-worker of Antoine's and ex-schoolmate of
Morgan's (small world) who is involved in community activism in Cape
Town's townships, as well as being a sysadmin and general Unix /
scripting hacker.

Antoine van Gelder wrote:
> Volunteers to live in Nepal for five months and work with OLPC-Nepal: 
> http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2007/05/were-looking-for-volunteers-for-this.html
>
> Jim Gettys pours some oil on the storm in the teacup: 
> http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/?p=34
>
> Alastair reports: http://tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1481
>
>   - antoine
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