I got my OLPC XO-1 Laptop!

I ordered my OLPC XO-1 the first week of December during their "Give One Get One" period. Hmm, is it XO-1 or X0-1? In case you've been hiding somewhere OLPC stands for One Laptop Per Child and has been formerly known as "the $100 Laptop". After months of waiting it finally came in the mail, in a very small box. They gave me no notification or tracking number, it just arrived as a surprise. It has a return address of BrightStar US, Inc., which seems to be some kind of "technology distributor". Interestingly, it says on the package it was ordered on March 7th, 2008 which is months off. Perhaps it is the date the BrightStar company was ordered to distribute it.

It's really quite simple - all that is included is the laptop, battery, an AC adapter, and instructions telling me to see http://www.laptopgiving.org/start for details on how to use it. So of course I installed the battery, plugged it in, and turned it on. It is about as small as I thought it would be, but heavier as well.
After about 30 minutes of fooling around I have to admit it is very hard to use. It is clearly designed for children! You don't have access to nearly any OS details/capabilities, let alone advanced ones. By the way did I mention the OS is called Sugar and is derived from Fedora Linux? At least there is a Terminal, but by default the PATHs aren't set, so to figure out your OLPC XO-1 MAC address you need to do:

• /sbin/ifconfig

And find the HWaddr for your mesh connection type. If I recall correctly it shares it with eth0 as well. It looks like the laptop does have some neat capabilities that I will need to try out in the future, and for now it should serve well as a distraction during long classes and/or work. Look for more posts on this in the future. Here are a couple more photos I took:


You can find more photos elsewhere, like here.