chanson

If you want to try the OLPC operating system, but don't have an XO-1 laptop, it's become extremely easy to just grab a virtual machine image and boot it in VMWare. I've used VMWare Fusion 1.1 on Mac OS X Leopard to do this; it's quite a bit faster than my XO-1, because I can give it more memory and set VMWare to use two cores instead of just one.

To get started, download a VirtualBox image — either one of the joyride pre-release images, or either a ship.2 or update.1 image — and unzip it. Then just double-click the vmx file in the unzipped archive and VMWare will load and run the image. That's all you need to do!

As always, there's an OLPC wiki VMWare entry going into more depth. But for just playing around with the software and collaboration technologies, this is a good way to go.

Note that there are several function keys that are on the XO-1 that have special meanings in the Sugar human interface. The Sugar instructions describe these shortcut keys; among other things, you can use F1 through F4 to go to the Neighborhood, Friends, Home, or Activity view and Alt-F to bring up the Frame. These are probably the most commonly used keys under Sugar, so it's a good idea if you're going to be playing with the OLPC software to internalize the keystrokes. (And to read the rest of the instructions, too!)