After waiting and waiting, it’s finally here, my XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program.  Have no idea what I’m talking about?  You haven’t been following my posts.  Shame on you!  The skinny, plus I pimp some random software, one click away!

The OLPC XO vs my 12" Mac, "Little Mac"

If you’re still in the dark, I’ll sum up.  The XO is a laptop intended for children in the third world.  It runs about $200 to produce/sell, and the idea is governments buy them in bulk, and give one to every grade-school kid in place of the usual bloated text-book budget (which is usually about $100 per kid, but the laptop price will come down with time).  We here in the first world weren’t going to be allowed to have any, mostly because they aren’t all that powerful, we’re not the target market, and it’s important the production time be spent where it’s needed.  But, the team needed a few extra pesos, so they put together a deal.  For two weeks (the deal was eventually extended to a couple months), if we paid $400 for two, we got to keep one.  The other went to some jolly junior.  Despite lack of funds, I got one.   END BACK STORY!

It’s a few more months until this thing hits gold status for shipping out its real orders, and the software isn’t perfectly polished yet.  Still, with an open mind, I can say this thing is amazing.  It’s seen a good bit of bad publicity from mouthy bloggers and computer elitists.  Closed-minded, paranoid folk haven’t helped matters, tossing around terms like "One Laptop Per Terrorist".  But, in the grand scheme of the project, those opinions matters very little, so we’re going to look at this from a purely open mind.

I could go on and on about every feature in detail, but the Internets has largely beat me to more detail than I could fit in a reasonably sized article.  Instead, I’ll hit a few highlights on gripes and praises, then its on to the abuse!

I. Love. The. Screen.  At only 7.5", you wouldn’t expect much.  You have no idea.  This little dingy runs at a staggering 1200×900 resolution, with super-crisp quality.  The down-side to that is running some applications not designed for it can lead to some dizzyingly small text.  But, on normal programs, text is book-quality crisp, especially in the black and white mode.  The mode I have lovingly begun calling "Gameboy Mode" is activated when you turn the brightness on the screen all of the way down.  The backlight turns off, and the screen enters a gray-scale mode in which the background is reflective, making the screen beautifully readable in sunlight, normally a nemesis to all laptop-kind.  Also, in this mode, a full battery can literally go for hours on end.  Some claim days, but those people are on drugs.  While the battery life is well above average laptop standards, the hype is somewhat excessive.  Still, since the screen can swivel around and close into a tablet (without the touch screen, sadly), it’s perfect for curling up in bed and scrolling through some light reading on the internet without it going dead.  It’s almost as easy on the eyes as a real book.

The browser sucks.  I realize the goals its trying to achieve, and the altered paradigm the software strives for, but you can’t change the internet.  It needs things that this just fails to deliver.  It’s really not much good for anything shy of direct reading and posting, and even then, you only get one window to do anything.  No new windows, no new tabs.  I guess it is the ultimate pop-up blocker, at least.  Opera has developed a version of Opera 9 for the XO, which is mostly what I use.  Aside from the tiny-text revisited in the menus, it works just fine.  YouTube is still out of the question, but my basic needs are met.

As a near tangent, the developers have tried to make the concept of files completely transparent.  Things you do and save go into a centralized journal that tracks everything you do, so retrieving a document you typed is a matter of finding that activity in your journal (the search feature here works great), and resuming it.  The document comes right back up as if it had been waiting in the background for you to return to it.  Alone, this setup is innovative and well designed.  When you introduce external media and the Internet, where the file paradigm is alive and well, this quickly falls apart and becomes frustrating to work with.

If you’re over the age of 12, the keyboard is crap.  It’s been mentioned a million times, but people don’t seem to grasp the size of this thing until they actually see one.  Add that it’s a mushy-keyed water-proof board, and touch typing becomes completely impossible for adult hands.  Well and fine for the target audience.  Bad for the rest of us.

Best of all, this baby runs on Linux.  Now, I’m no Linux humping hippy.  I tried, but I just don’t have the self-important ego necessary for it.  Still, while the developers of XO-specific software are still finding their feet, there’s tons of software out there, ready for the tinkering, and so I took a full belly flop and did just that.

This, of course, means emulators.  My first success was Dgen, the Sega Genesis emulator.  It’s somewhat buggy, but it’s fast, which is what’s needed to put that 433 MHz CPU to work.  There were some horror stories, but in the end, I was able to run about 75% of the games I tried either directly, or through tweaking, while using the gamepad mounted on the XO’s screen for the dpad and 4 main genesis buttons.  Frame rate was smooth, aside from the occasional, very brief stall, which seems to happen in most of the emulators, when the system occasionally needs to get at the disk.

Second run was Gngb, a Gameboy emulator which I thought appropriate for testing the screen’s "Gameboy Mode".  Again, tinkering was had, and the result pleasant.  The gamepad on the front was usable, as mushy as it may be (the kind of pad that seems to favor diagonals more than the 4 core directions).  It’s actually pretty easy to configure, since it’s nothing more than a remapping of the keyboard’s numberpad.  I had an exciting run of Gargoyle’s Quest, which lasted all of two random encounters before I was laid to waste.  Turning off the backlight made for a Gameboy Pocket quality visual experience, at a not-so-pocket scale.

ZSNES was not so successful.  In order to run at a remotely decent pace, OpenGL had to be deactivated during compiling, meaning the screen couldn’t be scaled more than 640×480.  Since the XO screen sits fixed at 1200×900, anything smaller just shows up as smaller.  The result was fairly smooth gameplay, but with a handheld sized viewing area.  It wouldn’t be so bad, if there wasn’t all that unused screen space to taunt me.

I skipped over the NES attempt, as it had already been attempted, with much hassle.  I’ll probably do it eventually, just to say that I did.

SCUMMVM runs flawlessly, assuming I don’t try to run the built in MIDI player.  I was able to get the CD, fully voiced version of Sam & Max Hit the Road to play in perfectly witty clarity and color, lacking only the "cheesy retro ambiance" music.  Other Lucas Arts SCUMM games that didn’t require MIDI ran without problem.

Branching somewhat from the emulation scene, I attempted to run the classic Linux title, Abuse.  If you’ve never played it, Abuse is a side-scrolling, platforming shooter, inspired by the First Person Shooter genre.  As such, you run and jump with the WASD buttons, but in a 2D fashion, and aim with a cross-hair and mouse.  The game supports screen stretching, but didn’t run at full speed when I did so, forcing me into a smaller window.  The touchpad mouse controls weren’t very flattering for the title either, and I left it fairly quickly, content with my proof of concept.

Next was Beats of Rage, a free beat ‘em up tribute to the Sega Streets of Rage series using SNK sprites.  Originally written for DOS, there was a Linux port, and so I gave it a try.  This was honestly one of my best gaming experiences on this thing to date.  The game is fun, in and of itself.  The low system requirements keep it running smooth.  When handed the laptop’s odd resolution, it happily scaled right up to the edges with no adverse effects or complaints, leaving not even the small border you can see in the previous games.  I was able to map the controls to the gamepad from within the game’s option menu, and it remembered them the next time I loaded it up, without prompting.  All in all, this game belongs on the XO.  Highly recommended.  If you’re having trouble getting it running, hit up the forums, and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Plenty of other software can run on the XO.  Using the Fedora’s "yum" installer, plenty of "useful" programs are already compiled and ready for putting to work.  But, if you thought my efforts would be spent testing the likes of OpenOffice, then you fail.

I put the beast to the test, and I think the yuppies need to quit their bitching.  The hardware works fine for its task, the software needs work, but shows amazing promise.  The real issue here has been humans.  The OLPC project has had to deal with them from the start, from complaints about deviating from the original $100 price tag, to over-reacting over kids being caught looking at porn on them, to being sued over some minor keyboard technology similarities.  People have been bashing the machines in blog reviews, and even Microsoft has made a couple of plays to get their marketing in on the deal.  Even Intel made what some would call a back-stab at the project.  That kind of pressure is more than I can put a single machine, and I’ve broken a lot of laptops.  They’ve held strong to a vision, and even if you can’t agree with it, you have to admire their heart and persistence.  The fact that I hold one of these units in my hand is tribute enough to that.