chanson

If you have an OLPC — or have set up VMWare or another environment to emulate one — and you're in the Silicon Valley area, there's a group of enthusiast hackers forming called SV_OLPC.

I ran into the founder of the group completely randomly after leaving NSCoder Night a couple weeks back, and it'll be interesting to see just who is doing what with the OLPC stack.

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!)

One thing that became apparent as I tried out the collaboration features is that there's a bug in the Chat activity on the OLPC. As you chat, it will continually scroll to the end. It's very easy to fix though, just follow the directions here.

Furthermore, if you actually take a look at the fixed chat.py you can see a little bit of what goes into an Activity in Sugar, the OLPC human interface and high-level software stack.

The collaboration features on the OLPC use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) — otherwise known as Jabber — to manage presence. There's an overview of the entire collaboration stack on the OLPC wiki under Shared Sugar Activities.

Essentially, what this means is that as long as there's a properly-configured Jabber server that you can connect to, you can find other OLPC users and interact with them over the network. Tom Hoffman graciously set up just such a server at xochat.org, and I've talked with a few different people there and visited a shared document.

To tell your XO to use the xochat.org Jabber server, you can just open the Terminal activity and do the following:

$ sugar-control-panel -g jabber > ~/old-jabber-server
$ sugar-control-panel -s jabber xochat.org

That will save your old Jabber server in the file old-jabber-server in your home directory, and tell the system to use a new one. However, the system won't automatically update itself after this change; to do that, you need to hold down the alt and ctrl keys, and press erase to restart the interface.

Once you've told your OLPC to use the xochat.org Jabber server and restarted the interface, you can just press the Neighborhood button — that's the circle with a ring of several dots in it — and you'll see everybody who's using an OLPC with that server. You can create group chats, share documents, and use all of the OLPC collaboration features because all they really require is a way to locate the users you want to collaborate with. The higher-level software on the OLPC will take care of the rest.

My XO-1 came with release 650 of the OLPC operating system, Sugar OS. However, according to the OLPC wiki the latest stable version of Sugar OS is 653. Updating your OS is simple, just follow the instructions once you get online with it.

I was able to get on my home WPA network — run by an AirPort Extreme (the pod, not the box) — by laboriously typing in the hex version of the WPA key. Fortunately I got it right; then it was just a matter of pulling up the Terminal activity, and running:

$ su -
# olpc-update -rv 653

That's it! Now I'm running 653 instead of 650, which fixes a few bugs.

You can also install updates from a USB memory stick, since the XO-1 can boot from a signed OS image file on a USB flash drive. This is useful if you want to download an image on your Mac or PC — say because you can't get online with your XO-1, and need the wireless networking fixes — and then just install it.

A couple weeks ago, the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop arrived. I ordered it through the Give 1, Get 1 program while it was running since — because they evidently don't want to actually get money with which to help their program except via donations — it was the only way to acquire one.

It's a very interesting system with a strong and opinionated design behind it. I really like that in a lot of ways the OLPC organization is willing to re-think large aspects of the mouse, menus and windows human interface that's standard on modern operating systems for what they're doing. I also like that they're actually trying to apply the Taligent People, Places and Things ideas for collaborative interfaces across their entire system.

There are, however, a lot of rough edges, both to the software stack itself as well as to OLPC as an organization when it comes to actually delivering what they've created. They're working on it though, and I have a bunch of posts in the queue about various aspects of the OLPC software, what they've done right and what they need to fix. I'll be tagging them all "OLPC" so they're easy to find.