OLPC: the more we know, the more we marvel

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 06:33

Opinion and Analysis

"In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken, closed-source, firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix," he writes.

The number of problems that he lists makes the operating system for the XO look like something built by the Keystone Kops - for example, keyboards with keys that got stuck, a dual-mode touchpad where one mode did not work and the other made the cursor jump around and at times shut off the XO.

Engineering issues with the boards made power management more or less impossible, the custom display controller was flawed in many respects , and the embedded controller blocked keyboard events and stopped machine suspend, writes Krstic.

"If Sugar was OLPC's biggest mistake, Windows on the XO would be selling like hotcakes. Let me remind you, then, that the number of Windows-based XOs that OLPC has sold is exactly zero," he writes.

"If I were a meaner person, I’d ask Nicholas why it is that Windows — you know, the Windows from Microsoft, mercifully unstained with the mistake of Sugar — can't even shut down an XO without throwing up a blue screen of death."

The OLPC claims that about 900,000 of the machines have been distributed worldwide so far. The target set was at least six times that amount.

What the US doesn't want is generally dumped in other countries. The Australian arm of the OLPC still continues to issue media releases - though it carefully avoids answering any media queries.

One of the main voices for the project, self-styled open source advocate Pia Waugh, has now gone to work as a political hack in Canberra for the Australian Labor Party.

The spin goes on, though; things are still "exciting" and there appear to be organisations that will throw good money after bad - Australia's Commonwealth Bank has got involved and OLPC Australia says it has received half a million dollars from an unknown benefactor.

The XOs are now being dumped in various Australian indigenous areas - a deployment was made in May 2009. On the plus side, it must be said that there is plenty of land available in Australia to bury the broken gadgets.