OLPC Operating System Available to Download 65
ThePopeLayton writes "Engadget is reporting that the operating system made specifically for the OLPC project is now available for download. 'Apparently, the Linux-based Sugar OS from the One Laptop Per Child project is now available via a bootable LiveCD ISO, and according to user reports, works quite well aside from the lack of WiFi capability on a certain MacBook.'"
Wgetting right now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Very nice. Need supported hardware list (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a supported hardware list? On what hardware does WiFi work?
OLPC Distro (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just like Microsoft BOB! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not as much of a problem with the OLPC. One of the activities is the Develop activity, which lets you make new activities that do whatever you want.
There's not much difference between "activities" and traditional "applications" here: Sugar activities get full control of the screen and they are the "thing" that gets shared between users in the multi-user environment. Otherwise, it's just a word choice to get the developers to concentrate more on what the user is doing than what they are doing it with.
Activities are fixable. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the case of pipelines, an activity is established as a flow of data between things - applications, devices, who cares? You can set up whatever pipelines you like and then your activity is triggered by dropping the initial data into the initial pipeline. Very simple. Anyone familiar with Jackson Structured Diagrams or a flowchart could put together as many activities as they liked without working up a sweat. It becomes nothing more than shell scripting with a GUI shell, and what one of us couldn't write whatever app they wanted in a shell script? Many probably have.
In the OO concept, you create activities by linking the applications as objects. Basically the same idea as pipelines and it's still shell scripting, the difference is that pipelines are isomorphic and isolated, whereas objects are polymorphic and inherited.
It would take most coders maybe a day to write a full-blown "shell" environment using one of these two approaches that would preserve the activity metaphor but give you absolute, total freedom.