Greetings from Amber's OLPC
Jan. 6th, 2008 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beth_leonardAfter a friend offered to get us a wireless access point, Jon dug ours out of the closet. He plugged it in, and now I'm using it from the OLPC. Yay for plug(less)and play! I didn't have to configure anything on my end. Jon would like to do some associated sysadmin work (such as password the connection) but I am satisfied for now.
I found the answers to yesterday's questions about changing my username and icon color. (Use the terminal)
Overall, I'm getting used to the GUI. It's not what I'm used to, which automatically makes me suspicious of it, but once I got used to the paradigm, it's not so bad. The 'OS' layer (if you can call it that?), the Sugar interface, needs polishing with respect to optimization.
I believe I've read that most of it is written in python. I wonder if this is one of those cases where language performance really does matter. Some of the applications are particularly slow, i.e. I spent 2 minutes brushing my teeth watching the unresponsive screen after hitting the 'load' button, waiting for the find-file dialog box. I waited over half an hour for a previously successfully launched application to load, and eventually decided to reboot the machine. I considered it to be the known problem with build 650 that sometimes applications don't launch, so I (gasp) voluntarily upgraded the OS on Peter's laptop to build 653, which was supposed to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that broke the mouse, so I'm now on Amber's laptop about to search for directions on either fixing the mouse or downgrading.
The full thrust of most of the programs that come with the laptop seems to be to teach children to program and to think for themselves and figure things out on their own and collaborating with others.
While this is the leading educational theory, as an adult sometimes I just want someone to tell me how it works. I must admit though, I know much more about it now after playing around with it for two days, and the feedback loop is addictive. Now I want to document what I've done and go fix some bugs. (Of which there are many.)
--Beth
I found the answers to yesterday's questions about changing my username and icon color. (Use the terminal)
Overall, I'm getting used to the GUI. It's not what I'm used to, which automatically makes me suspicious of it, but once I got used to the paradigm, it's not so bad. The 'OS' layer (if you can call it that?), the Sugar interface, needs polishing with respect to optimization.
I believe I've read that most of it is written in python. I wonder if this is one of those cases where language performance really does matter. Some of the applications are particularly slow, i.e. I spent 2 minutes brushing my teeth watching the unresponsive screen after hitting the 'load' button, waiting for the find-file dialog box. I waited over half an hour for a previously successfully launched application to load, and eventually decided to reboot the machine. I considered it to be the known problem with build 650 that sometimes applications don't launch, so I (gasp) voluntarily upgraded the OS on Peter's laptop to build 653, which was supposed to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that broke the mouse, so I'm now on Amber's laptop about to search for directions on either fixing the mouse or downgrading.
The full thrust of most of the programs that come with the laptop seems to be to teach children to program and to think for themselves and figure things out on their own and collaborating with others.
While this is the leading educational theory, as an adult sometimes I just want someone to tell me how it works. I must admit though, I know much more about it now after playing around with it for two days, and the feedback loop is addictive. Now I want to document what I've done and go fix some bugs. (Of which there are many.)
--Beth
