[Olpc-za] News Snippets

[Antoine van Gelder]

Peter van Heusden wrote:
> 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,

Partly volume orders to bring manufacturing costs down but also volume 
sales in order to avoid having to spend millions on building and 
maintaining a traditional marketing and distribution network.

I don't know the exact figures, but that network usually makes up an 
uncomfortably large portion of the cost of a laptop.



>  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].

*grimace*


>  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.
>   

*enthusiastic nodding*

> And of course this also means pushing back against the "it should run
> Windows" meme.
>   

IMO Windows is a tar baby. Push and we'll get stuck.

Sometimes I like to meditate upon the legendary frugality of education 
departments everywhere and ponder the irony of  poor kids getting Linux 
and learning System Programming while rich kids get Windows and learn 
how to drive the "Bad News" wizard in Powerpoint.


> 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).
>   

I eventually gave up entirely on trying to boot under qemu and opted for 
either booting directly off the LiveCD or using vmware.

> Also I'd like to grow the disk image to give me more space to play with
> - any idea if this is possible? 

rdev(8) ?

> My other option is getting Sugar running
> separately (probably on my oldish FreeBSD box) - anyone had success with
> that?
>   

If you got it running under FreeBSD you would probably be the first. 
Don't know of anyone who has even tried.

A word of warning: building sugar from source can be fiendishly fiddly - 
give me a shout if you need a hand!

 - antoine