Trying Out the OLPC User Interface
By Tom Hoffman on May 23, 2006.
Well, my link to pictures of a bare OLPC circuit board running yesterday have been quickly outstripped by pictures of a complete running prototype. So to regain whatever One Laptop Per Child street cred I've got, I got Sugar, the basic OLPC user interface shell, running last night. It was rather a pain; I set up a Fedora Linux virtual machine, since Sugar is being written by Fedora developers, and I had to track down a number of extra packages, ultimately getting some help on the #olpc irc channel. Development is moving very quickly, and the documentation is lagging behind. That's understandable. One shouldn't necessarily expect the final product to resemble the current development version, and this also represents at most a default configuration of the OLPC device. Individual countries can run whatever software they want on it.
The picture above is the shell running on a Fedora Linux desktop, so the part inside the "OLPC Sugar" window would be what you'd see on the OLPC laptop itself, filling the device's 7" screen. Right now, you've got two basic apps. A web browser that's using Mozilla/Firefox's Gecko rendering engine, and a chat client. One interesting little feature integrating the two is the "Share this page with the group" bar at the top of the browser window. It sends a link to the current page to the rest of your group (i.e., class) over chat.
Surprisingly, the chat client implements its own protocol. It uses Zeroconf for local discovery, like Bonjour chat on iChat. I'm not sure if it works for chatting outside a local (wireless mesh) network. As you can see above, the chat client also supports some sketchpad capability. Note that the OLPC laptop has a very wide trackpad, similar in proportion to the text entry box under the chat window, so that it should be possible to write words on the trackpad with a stylus. The drawing is encoded and passed as SVG XML markup.
Technically, there's tons for me to be excited about. This is all written in Python (same as SchoolTool). The exensive use of Zeroconf networking is reminiscent of the Instiki hack Tim and I cooked up.
You can't underestimate how much the design of this system flies directly in the face of the conventional wisdom in the US of how IT in a school is supposed to work. With mesh networking, there won't be a hard firewall between the school and the community, or the rest of the web. Chat isn't diabled; it is explicitly enabled. The underlying software is not locked down; it is unlocked by design. If you've been writing this project off as a simple attempt to distribute cheap hardware, prepare to have your eyes opened.
Ref:
自由軟體技術交流網-新聞區
Everyday Work-這就是教育了
Ed-Tech Insider Trying Out the OLPC User Interface
OLPC_Python_Environment
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