Media-Hive

After missing out on a Modo many years ago (if anyone has one they want to sell, let me know). I’ve become somewhat of an ‘cool’ electronics obsessive. So when OLPC the people behind the $100 XO laptop started their Give1Get1 program last year, I was there day 1 with Amex in hand.Well it finally arrived and here are my, and others first impressions.

Opening the Box: Where’s the rest of the packaging. It came in a box with a 3 page booklet and a power pack, nothing else, no instruction manual, no additional plugins or widgets, just a tiny green and white laptop…. I have to say it was rather exciting.

First Instinct Go Online - not so easy: I’m sure that WEP and WPA networks aren’t their #1 consumer priority, so I wasn’t surprised that networking was a little fudgey, but I look forward to some of it being cleaned up. I have yet to connect to any secure network (WEP at work doesn’t work, WEP Transitional at home through Apple Airport Extreme is well documented as a nightmare - yet I still can’t connect). Luckily I have my open meraki mesh network at home for this exact reason and was able to connect to that throttled but open connection with no issue.

Mesh Networks: When you go to the neighborhood view you see 3 mesh networks available. I assumed these were other technophiles in my quiet suburban area “how cool” I thought. Further reading it turns out these are mesh networks that the XO makes and “pings” to. So my burb isn’t as cool as I first suspected. I wish there was some way to make the XO visible to others, again I know I’m not the target audience, but I doubt I’ll ever see another XO, so it makes half of what it can do unavailable. It would be nice if you could convert the mesh to Bonjour (for use at work) or even something more wide area like Jabber or AIM. Funnily enough, last time we played with it in the office, we actually found our first XO mesh connection (we assume someone in the Starbucks across the street maybe), they didn’t reply to my attempts to instant message with them. We also discovered that if you’re on a network that has other laptops (especially Mac’s) they appear in the mesh view, the XO also appeared in the iChat bonjour buddy list (which was very exciting). However we couldn’t find any way to actually communicate between the two.

Build Quality is Amazing: It feels solid, yet light. Well thought out, functional and fun. The outside is a slightly rubbery dimpled surface that feels “nice”. It does not feel cheap in any way. The fact that you can rotate the screen use it as an ebook reader (or a handheld Doom player), the fact that it has an Apple’esque video camera, stereo speakers, usb ports, etc, etc. This is probably the most exciting bit for me, the industrial design that has gone into the manufacture is second to none.

Applications:I have to admit, I’ve barely touched the apps yet. Spending most of my XO time fiddling with the network and trying to install Doom (I know, I know). I’ll report more when I have. That said the overall “OS” is very nice. Sugar as it’s called, is functional and like no other OS UI out there (yet it shares many similarities). It’s clear that the UI has been tailor made to meet the ethos of shared community laptop use. All the applications are sharable - think of it like every application has been crossed with wikipedia style functionality.

Rick Adds:

I only had a the XO in my hands for several minutes, and the first thing I did was find the terminal so that I could see what the system was made of in terms of software. The base OS looks like a somewhat modified version of Fedora and with the references to Gnome sprinkled around, it looks like Sugar GUI is a customized flavor of the popular windowing environment.

One thing that seemed odd to me was that this system had a wide open root account by default — I was able to simply ’su’ and without challenge was given root access. One can imagine how rapidly a malicious script could spread and infect XOs meshed together on a network. Perhaps the coolest and forward thinking feature of the XO is the Mesh networking ability that is built into the unit. Using the 802.11s mesh networking standard gives it the ability to create and connect to ad hoc networks with other XOs and mesh devices without the need for a central router (though of course to connect to the rest of the internet, something in the mesh will need to be connected to an isp).

Mesh networks are still a new concept (802.11s isn’t even a final spec yet), but I think meshes will be a revolutionary step in opening up the power of networked computing devices. Instead of relying on a service provider to be the doorway to the rest of the internet, each device itself will become a node, acting as part router, part server and part client all at the same time.